How to recover files from mobile phone after factory reset?

Most of people tend to use factory rest to clear their data on the phone when they do not use this phone, or want to give or send it to others. It seems a perfect solution but that is not the truth. Factory reset does clear out all the data on the phone and reset the phone to the factory state, but it does not always wipe everything. People who have ulterior motives still can recover your personal data with data recovery tools. Therefore, before you can send or give the phone to others, you need to ensure that you have completely wipe all your data on the phone.

Why the data still can be recovered after factory reset?

Factory reset will not erase the data. Just as the same as you delete files on USB drives, hard drive, the files on your mobile phone will not been wiped. Instead, the data are marked as deleted and become invisible. If there are no new data written by system, the hidden files will keep on your phone’s internal storage, waiting to be overwritten. In that case, other people who take your phone can restore the deleted files.

Most of data recovery software can achieve this easily. Now we can take a look at how the data recovery software can retrieve your deleted files from your mobile phone SD card.

How to Restore Permanently Deleted Files From SD Card

What can you do to permanently erase the data on mobile phone?

Now we have learned that factory reset will not permanently wipe your data, then what should we do to secure our personal data on the phone? Don’t worry, there is still another way to make your data unrecoverable.

You just need to encrypt the data before you perform a factory reset. If you have encrypted the data and then factory reset the phone, the data will never be recovered.

How to encrypt the data on phone?

You can tap Setting>Security>Encrypt phone, on this screen, it will tell you that once you encrypt the phone you can not decrypt the phone unless you perform a factory data reset which will ease all your data. That means that once your phone has been encrypted, you have no way button factory reset it.

Click Encrypt phone, it will starts automatically. Generally it will take more than one hours so you should make sure the power left in your phone is enough or you can connect the phone to power until the encryption process completed, or you will loses some or all of your data.

After encrypt the phone, you should do a factory reset to make the data unrecoverable. Find Factory data reset in Setting, tap the button of Reset phone, it will erase all your data from the mobile phone.

Other choices is to use the third-party data wiping tool to erase your data on the phone. That is also an very easy way to help you secure your data. As factory reset after encrypting your data will permanently erase your data, you should always keep in mind to back up your data before that. Even if you do not need to sell or send your phone to others, you should also back up your data regularly.