How to get your data off a phone before you sell it
Signing out matters more than wiping. What each account needs, in Settings, and why the factory reset is ours to do at your door.
There are two different jobs here and people usually do the second one only. The first is unlinking the phone from your accounts. The second is erasing what is on it. Skip the first and the phone is a paperweight to whoever buys it; skip the second and your photos travel with it. Both take about ten minutes together.
First: get your data off
Photos, chats, contacts, notes, authenticator apps. iCloud or Google One will run a backup overnight on Wi-Fi. WhatsApp keeps its own backup — start it inside WhatsApp (Settings → Chats → Chat backup) rather than assuming the phone-level one covers it. If you use an authenticator app for banking or work, move those codes to the new phone before the old one goes; they are the one thing a backup often does not carry.
Then check the backup finished. Look at the date on it, or set the new phone up from it, before you hand the old one over.
Second: sign out, in this order
On an iPhone or iPad
- Settings → your name → Find My → Find My iPhone → off. This is the one that matters: Activation Lock is what stops the phone being set up by anyone else.
- Settings → your name → scroll to the bottom → Sign Out. Signing out of iCloud turns Find My off too, so if you do this you have done both.
- Unpair an Apple Watch from the Watch app, if the phone is paired to one.
On an Android phone
- Settings → Passwords & accounts (Accounts on some phones) → Google → Remove account. This clears Factory Reset Protection, the Android equivalent of Activation Lock.
- Remove the manufacturer's account as well, if there is one: Samsung account on a Galaxy, Mi account on a Xiaomi or Redmi, and the same for OnePlus, Oppo, Vivo or Realme. A Samsung phone still signed in to a Samsung account is as locked as an iPhone signed in to an Apple ID.
Bought the phone on an instalment plan? If the seller or lender installed a device-management or locking app of its own, that has to be cleared by them before the phone can be reset and handed over.
Third: take out what is physically yours
The SIM and the memory card. The SIM especially — a phone that leaves with your SIM in it is a phone that can still receive your one-time codes.
What we do, and why we ask you not to
The factory reset itself is ours. Our agent resets the device in front of you at pickup, as part of the handover, so nothing of yours is on it when it leaves your hands and you can watch it happen. Doing it yourself the night before gains nothing: the reset happens at the door either way, and a phone that is still set up is faster to check against the answers you gave.
What happens after that
The phone goes on to be graded and refurbished, and the storage is wiped again in that process. What actually happens to a phone after you sell it is a separate post.
Once the backup is done, a price for the phone takes about a minute on the sell page.
See what your phone is worth
A price in about a minute, free doorstep pickup in a two-hour slot, and paid — cash or bank transfer — before our agent leaves.
Questions people ask
- Is a factory reset enough to protect my data?
- A reset on any current iPhone or Android phone erases the encryption key, so what is left on the storage cannot be read back. What a reset does not do is unlink the phone from your account — that is a separate step, and it has to come first.
- How do I turn off Find My iPhone?
- Settings → your name at the top → Find My → Find My iPhone → off. Signing out of iCloud does the same thing, and you need to sign out anyway.
- What is Factory Reset Protection on Android?
- A lock that asks for the Google account that was on the phone before it can be set up again. Removing your Google account in Settings before the phone leaves is what clears it.
- Do I have to erase the phone myself before pickup?
- No. Our agent factory resets it in front of you as part of the handover, so the wipe happens where you can see it.