Ol d phone clea n

Our smartphones have lots of personal and confidential data stored on them, so when you’ve decided to take your old iPhone out of commission, you need to take all of that information off it. The quickest and safest way is built right into the iPhone itself. Navigate to Settings > General you’ll find a Reset menu tucked away at the bottom of the General tab. Open it and inside you’ll find an array of choices for restoring certain system defaults such as the Network Settings, your Location & Privacy settings. But you’ll want to go straight for the nuclear option now: Erase all Contents and Settings.

It’s fairly self-explanatory. Select it and you’ll be prompted to enter your passcode and given a warning that your media, data and settings will all be permanently deleted. Continue and your phone will restart, removing the Apple encryption key responsible for protecting your data before securely shredding it in less than five minutes. Alternatively, you can accomplish the same thing by plugging your iPhone into your Mac and clicking Restore to return it to its factory settings.

You’ll also need to disassociate your old iPhone from your Apple ID. Running iOS 7 and have Find My iPhone activated?

The safest way to wipe your iPhone is in Settings > General; you’ll find a Reset menu there

Erase all Contents and Settings does this for you. If not, you can do it through your iCloud account at icloud.com. Sign in, choose Find My iPhone; click All Devices and select the phone you wish to remove; underneath the Play Sound, Lost Mode, and Erase iPhone options, you’ll see Remove from Account.

When you’ve done all this, the original iOS Setup Assistant will be waiting for whoever will be using your old iPhone next. Every last bit of personal information, customisation or history that might have been on your phone will have been completely and securely blitzed – although if you decide to hang on to your phone, you can always use that iCloud backup you just made to get all your data back.