Hard resets are your friend…a Gear Diary Public Service Announcement

Posted on 22 September 2009 by


Gear Diary Smokey the Bear

I bought myself a new (to me) toy on eBay: a Samsung Propel Pro. It was very exciting to come home from work today and find the small FedEx box on my front steps. I ran inside, booted the phone up and started fiddling, only to notice the previous owner did not fully wipe their contacts from the device. Bad!

I googled around, figured out how to hard reset it, and now, freshly reset, I am up and running on my new toy.

But it did serve as a very good reminder: ALWAYS make sure your reset “takes” when you are selling a device. Especially on a smartphone, where you may be storing passwords, work emails, banking information, etc. I was nice and immediately made sure the phone was wiped clean. Someone else might not have been…

Has anyone else ever had this happen? Ever sell a phone/computer/iPod/etc and realize you forgot to remove something important? Ever find anything on a device you bought secondhand? Share it below!

(And yes, I emailed the seller to remind him to always properly reset in the future!)

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- who has written 924 posts on Gear Diary.

Carly has been a gadget fiend for a long time, going back to her first PDA (a Palm M100). She quickly went from researching what PDA to buy to following tech news closely and keeping up with the latest and greatest stuff. She loves writing about ebooks because they combine her two favorite activities; reading anything and everything, and talking about fun new tech toys. What could be better?

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  • jkj1962

    My company once purchased some used DOS-based PCs and found all of the personal info of the previous users, resumes, personal correspondence, etc. still intact. There was even several expensive software packages left, like Lotus 1-2-3, and WordPerfect.

    I wiped the personal info, and kept the software. :~)

  • Q

    The title of this post is a bit ironic, as sometimes hard resets aren’t enough (e.g. Palm OS Treo models). While it takes a bit of effort that’s well beyond the average user, it’s still possible to recover data from them post-hard reset. On the other hand, there are other resets (factory or zero-out) that overwrite all data with 1s and 0s.

    Takeaway: always confirm–from the manufacturer or a *verified* source–what the best approach is to wipe all data. I read an article on this about 3 years ago in the Washington Post, and the web version had a link to a guide for different models. The directions for a Treo 650 were for a hard reset rather than a factory reset–when the difference is limited and only takes a few seconds. Can we say “FAIL,” boys and girls? (I’d skip zero-out, too–Palm’s directions for that one actually talk about needing both hands and holding the stylus in your teeth!)