November 1, 2024
Suggestions For Securely Erasing an iPhone

Suggestions For Securely Erasing an iPhone

Posted May 25, 2008 at 12:01am by iClarified
If you are going to sell your iPhone, iPod touch you may want to consider securely erasing it.

Recently an Oregon State Police detective confirmed to Jonathon Zdziarski that an OTB refurbished iPhone he purchased contained recoverable personal data. Zdziarski writes, “While the restore process takes long enough to make most people assume the “disk” stored in NAND memory is formatted, it actually isn’t.

MacsimumNews has compiled a list of suggested procedures to securely erase the iPhone. Here are the 7 suggestions:


1. Change passwords for all mail accounts that are synced to the iPhone or touch.
2. Make sure the device can no longer open the mail accounts.
3. Do an erase/restore of the iPhone or iPod touch, preferably using another computer or at least another account than the one the device was synced with.
4. Sync as many songs/videos of a non-compromising nature and nothing else to the newly restored device as will fit.
5. A good tool I recommend using to fill the drive up with data (songs/videos), is PhoneView. You can directly access the disk on your iPhone to totally fill it up.
6. After you have filled the drive up, do another erase/restore.
7. Repeat steps 4/5 with different content and erase/restore again. The more times you do this, the more times the data will be overwritten, thus having a less chance of recovery.

Once well confirmed or an official procedure is released we will post a step by step guide. Until then you may want to follow some of these suggestions to ensure the security of your data.

Read More

Suggestions For Securely Erasing an iPhone


Add Comment
Would you like to be notified when someone replies or adds a new comment?
Yes (All Threads)
Yes (This Thread Only)
No
iClarified Icon
Notifications
Would you like to be notified when we post a new Apple news article or tutorial?
Yes
No
Comments (1)
You must login or register to add a comment...
Braden
Braden - May 25, 2008 at 9:21am
Multinova from iPhonefreakz.com has released a tool in his repository (iphonefreakz.com/repo.xml) called Erase Utility. This tool scrambles the data on the media partition, enabling you to do a safe restore in iTunes.
Recent. Read the latest Apple News.
RECENT
Tutorials. Help is here.
TUTORIALS
Where to Download macOS Sonoma
Where to Download macOS Ventura
AppleTV Firmware Download Locations
Where To Download iPad Firmware Files From
Where To Download iPhone Firmware Files From
Deals. Save on Apple devices and accessories.
DEALS