Before you sell, trade in or bin an old phone or computer

When an old phone or computer leaves your business — sold, traded in, handed down or dropped in the e-waste bin — it takes more with it than most people realise: your email, your files, saved passwords, and the app that generates your sign-in codes. The fix is a proper factory reset, done in the right order. On a modern phone or laptop that reset genuinely works, but the order matters, and one step in particular is the one people regret skipping.

Try this first

Wiping a phone:

Move your authenticator app to your new phone first. Before anything else. If your sign-in codes only exist on the old phone, wiping it can lock you out of your own accounts. Our guide New phone and your MFA codes are gone covers how to move them — do it while the old phone still works.
Confirm your photos and data are backed up. Check that the photos, contacts and messages you care about actually appear on the new phone or in your backup before you erase anything.
Sign out of your accounts. Sign out of your Apple or Google account and any work apps. On an iPhone this also releases Activation Lock, so the next owner can actually use the phone.
Factory reset it. On an iPhone: Settings → General → Transfer or Reset iPhone → Erase All Content and Settings. On Android: Settings → System → Reset (the exact wording varies a little between brands), then choose the option that erases all data.
Remove the SIM. Pop the SIM card out before the phone leaves your hands.

Wiping a computer:

Confirm your files are in OneDrive or SharePoint, not just sitting in a local folder. Open a few recent files from another device to be sure they are really there.
Sign out of your email, your browser and OneDrive.
Reset Windows. Go to Settings → System → Recovery → Reset this PC, and choose Remove everything. On a modern computer with an encrypted drive, this genuinely puts your data beyond reach.

Before it leaves the building

Two situations where you should talk to us rather than doing it yourself. If it is a work machine we manage, let us do the wipe: we remove it from management properly, so the software licences and access tied to it come back to the business instead of being stranded on a retired computer. And if you have old drives, external disks or NAS disks that held business data and cannot be wiped — dead, or too old to trust — they should be physically destroyed, not binned. We can arrange that; just ask.

Three things not to do:

Do not trade in a phone while it is still your only MFA device. Move the authenticator app first, every time.
Do not just delete files and call it wiped. Deleted files are recoverable with cheap, widely available software. Only a full factory reset counts.
Do not bin old drives or NAS disks whole. A drive pulled from a dead computer often still reads perfectly in a working one.

Why this happens

Modern phones and computers encrypt everything stored on them, and a factory reset destroys the key that makes the data readable. That is why a proper reset on a recent device is genuinely effective — and why older, unencrypted drives are a different story, where nothing short of physical destruction protects what was on them. The step that catches people out is not the wipe itself but the order: the wipe works perfectly, and takes the only copy of their sign-in codes with it. Moving the authenticator app first costs five minutes; recovering locked accounts afterwards costs a lot more.

Still stuck?

Log a ticket at portal.yougrowit.com.au or email support@yougrowit.com.au. If it is stopping you working right now, call 03 9028 4358.

Support hours are Monday to Friday, 8:30am to 5:30pm Melbourne time, excluding Victorian public holidays.

Not a client yet?

This help centre is free to read and we would rather you fixed it yourself. If it has not worked, or you would rather someone just dealt with it:

The first call is free. Tell us what’s happening and we’ll tell you what we think it is, what fixing it involves, and what it’ll cost — before anything is charged. If it turns out to be a five-minute thing, we’ll usually just sort it out on the call.