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by John W. Simek, Vice President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.

Five Critical Items to Perform Prior to Selling Your Smartphone

April 27, 2022

At some point, you may be considering selling your old smartphone. Your mobile device can contain a significant amount of personal and private information that you don’t want to transfer as part of the sale. Gizmodo has a post describing what you should do to prepare your phone.

  1. Backup everything
  2. Move your two-factor authentication codes
  3. Sign out of your accounts
  4. Transfer your chats
  5. Run a factory reset

When you backup your information don’t forget about files you may have stored on a memory expansion card if you are an Android user. Moving your authentication codes is an important step to avoid re-registering your new phone to all your accounts. Typically, you would export a backup of the authentication app codes. You then import the backup to your new device. Signing out of your accounts will disassociate your old phone with your account. The buyer of your phone may have trouble adding their accounts if you don’t sign out of yours first. Make sure you perform a factory reset as your final step.

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