Factory Resetting your Android device is one of the most effective solutions, but at the same timeit’s the most drastic method that allows you to restore your smartphone or tablet to the Google original operating system by erasing all data and settings. You may wonder why to resort to such a drastic solution for your Android device, but it is good to make such a recovery regularly, for the simple reason that the system over time tends to grow heavy and becomes slow. Restoring the system to initial state allows you to get a fluid and lighter system.
Some combinations of settings, or changes to the system may lead tounsolvable bugs, and the only solution may be the Factory Resetting of that device. Thanks to built-in features in the system we can Factory Reset the Android device in a few practical and easy steps.
Before performing a restore to factory data, you need to back up all your data, like photos, videos, music, apps, games or files.
If you have an Android device, you certainly use an e-mail account, so it’s good to set the backup account. To do that, head to Settings > Backup and Restore > Backup account. From there, you can select one of your email accounts to save settings, apps and games installed so that in the case of recovery you can restore it easily on the device.
Please note that this does not save the data of your games or applications, it will simply remember the software installed in the moment when we restore, ensuring to reinstall everything through the Google Play Store. As the backup process is complex, the full backup of your device needs root permissions.
Some Android devices come with their own recovery systemand allows you to save the arrangement of the elements of your home screen, or the APK files, settings, and much more. You’ll have to manually check if your device has such features under Settings > Backup and Restore.
However, the data you have on the microSD, which is an external memory of your Android device, are not deleted during the procedure. If you want to save photos, videos or documents, you can take advantage of the microSD, as a backup tool also.
How to Factory Reset Android
Once you saved all your important data, proceeding with the restore to factory data, the steps to follow are very simple:
- On your Android smartphone or tablet, head to the Settings menu and open it.
- Look under Backup and Reset or Privacy, depends on where the manufacturer of your device has placed the option. You may need to enter your pattern, password or PIN.
- Scroll the entries and look for Factory Reset and confirm.
- Now you have to wait until the end of the procedure and the device will reboot.
How to Hard Reset your Android device
There is also a procedure,known as Hard Reset, that completely resets your Android device and can be used in emergency cases, when the device is definitive block, perhaps during a software update, or maybe even during a reset to the factory data.
To Hard Reset your Android device,you have to go to the recovery of your device, which is an external software to the operating system and allows among other things the removal of data and settings.
To access the recovery of your Android device, you need to restart it in Recovery Mode, an operation that is usually done with the combination of pressing Volume Down + Power Button + Home button simultaneously. However, this can vary from device to device, and you can always search directly on Google and check by your device name what its Recovery method is.
Once in Recovery Mode, you can browse through the menu items using the Volume key and confirming with the Power button. Select the Recovery, and then look for the option Wipe Data / Factory Reset. At this point, select ‘Yes’ from the menu that will open, and wait for the operation to complete.
