Do this before you trade in your phone

Marc Saltzman | Special for USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Surf Report: How to easily back up media before wiping your smartphone Tech columnist Marc Saltzman gives you tips on how to safely and easily back up your phone's media before wiping it to trade in.

Tempted to upgrade to a new iPhone or Galaxy? You’re not alone – especially as it’s the time of the year we see shiny new devices debut from heavyweights like Apple and Samsung.

To make it even more tempting, many phone providers and retailers offer a trade-in incentive.

After all, you likely don’t need your existing device if you’re upgrading to a new model, so it’s not a bad idea to take advantage of trade-in deals. But there are a couple of things you need to do first.

It’s critical to back-up your phone’s information, followed by properly removing your personal (or professional) data, as you don’t want to risk it falling into the wrong hands after it leaves yours.

“When it comes to trading in an old phone for a newer one, you absolutely need to be concerned about data security,” says Todd Zegers, Vice President of Ingram Micro, ITAD & Reverse Logistics.

(ITAD, or information technology asset disposition, refers to the proper disposing of obsolete or unwanted equipment in a safe, secure, and ecologically-responsible manner.)

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“Typically, if it’s a working phone, and it’s a somewhat newer model, these devices have a pretty good ‘factory erase’ setting you would initiate before trading in,” Zegers adds. “The challenge is if the phone doesn’t turn on and your data still resides on the SSD (Solid State Drive) chip inside. In that case, you’ll need to physically remove and destroy the SSD, repair the phone to enable the ‘factory erase,’ or use a third-party data erasure software.”

In the latter scenario, Zegers says you’ll want to find a company that can properly erase and destroy or recycle the phone and provide you with a certificate upon completion. Large enterprises use third-party data erasure products with global certifications and can verify 100 percent that devices are wiped via validation reports. While these products aren’t accessible to individual consumers, “if you take a device to an established chain, like Best Buy or Office Depot, they will use reputable companies that are certified to destroy the data properly,” explains Zegers, whose company provides ITAD services to large enterprises in industries that handle significant personal data, like banking, education, insurance, health care and legal.

“If you go to a free community drop-off location or event, they might just sell your device to a broker for the overseas market, and who knows where your data is going, if not erased properly or physically destroyed prior to giving it to them,” cautions Zegers. In summary, “do you research and get proof of the erasure or destruction.”

Here, I’ll cover how to properly delete your phone’s data before you trade it in, donate it, or recycle it.

First, back it up

Before you do anything, the first thing you should do is properly back up your phone’s files, so you can access them later. You may want to load them back onto your new phone or at the very least, access your photos and videos on a computer or television in the future.

One option is to upload images to a cloud provider, such as iCloud, Google Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox. Typically, you’d get about 5 gigabytes of remote storage for free, but this likely won’t be enough for you, so you might consider paying for more. Personally, I use OneDrive, as it offers 1 terabyte of storage (more than 1,000GB) as part of the annual Office 365 Personal subscription ($69/year). If you have a healthy data plan, you can also have all captured photos automatically saved to a cloud account, as soon as you take them.

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Another suggestion is to manually copy over photos and videos from your smartphone to a PC or Mac. Simply connect the device to a computer via its USB port, and in Windows Explorer (for Windows) or Finder (on a Mac), click the drive letter of your phone or tablet (such as D: or E:), and enter the folder called DCIM, which holds all your captured photos and videos. They may be in subfolders, but they’ll all be here. Now drag and drop (or cut and paste) them onto your computer or an external drive. With iOS devices, you can also backup via iTunes.

A third (and super easy) way is to use a product like the SanDisk’s iXpand Flash Drive (from $29 for 16GB), which plugs into the Lightning connector of an iPhone or iPad, and automatically backs-up your photos and videos for you (via a companion app). You can select what gets backed-up, if you prefer, or back-up all photos and videos. You can leave this doohickey inserted in an iOS device and take photos or videos directly onto the drive, so it bypasses internal storage altogether. The other end of the drive is a full-size USB 3.0 port, which can be plugged into a PC or Mac.

Android users, on the other hand, might opt for the SanDisk Ultra Dual Drive M3.0 (from $9 for 16GB).

Properly wipe the device

Before you trade in your old phone, it’s important to properly wipe the data clean.

A factory reset will work, so long as you encrypt the phone first.

For Android users, if you existing phone runs Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) or newer, your data will already be encrypted by default. So, you’re good.

If you’ve got an older Android OS, you’ll want to add encryption as it will require someone to have a PIN or password to access your data. In most cases, go to Settings > Security & privacy > Encrypt phone. It can take a while for this process to complete, so be sure to have your phone plugged into an AC outlet. On a Samsung Galaxy, you’ll go to Settings > Lock screen and security > Protect encrypted data.

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You’ll have the option to encrypt the SD memory card as well, if your phone takes one and you have one installed, but you should remove this external storage anyway if you’re giving away your phone. Be sure to also sign out (and then delete) your accounts, such as Google and Samsung (on a Galaxy device), just to be safe.

Now go ahead and do the factory reset, which is usually found in the Backup & reset tab in your Settings.

For iPhone, iOS 5 or later also includes hardware encryption when you set a passcode. This makes it very difficult for anyone who tries to recover your data.

First, be sure to turn off all services, starting with Find My iPhone (Settings > iCloud > Find My iPhone), and then signing out of iCloud completely. For iOS 7 and newer, choose Delete Account. Sign out of other services, like iMessage, and Apple ID.

Now start the wipe process by going to Settings > General > Reset > Erase All Content and Settings.

Follow Marc on Twitter: @marc_saltzman. E-mail him at askmarcsaltzman@gmail.com.