How to soft and hard reset your iPhone

When trying to troubleshoot iPhone problems, several incremental steps can be taken as potential solutions, including soft and hard resets. Before taking your phone in for repair, consider some basic troubleshooting at home.

The tech community as a whole has long been divided on the specific definitions of soft and hard reset. For some, a soft reset means restarting a device, while a hard reset is a complete factory reset that erases all data. For others, a factory reset is a completely separate concept, and the difference between a soft and hard reset lies in whether the reboot was done through a device’s menus or by turning off the power manually. To add even more confusion, where does deleting your settings, but not erasing all your data, fit in on this scale?

This can all get very complicated and there is no definitive answer. However, for the purposes of this article, we will look at three types of useful resets according to the following definitions:

• Restart: Restart your phone without losing any data

• Soft reset: Clear all settings without erasing data

• Hard reset: A complete reset of the phone, erasing all data

Restarting your phone can be beneficial for a multitude of reasons, and it’s often the best first step towards iPhone troubleshooting – the old recommendation of turning something off and on again is always a good place to start. It acts as a quick refresh, clearing your RAM and closing any problematic programs. If the usual double press of the Side button and Volume Up button doesn’t bring up your phone’s power slider, you can force restart your iPhone by doing the following:

1. Quickly press and release the volume up buttonthen do the same with the volume down button

2. Press and hold the side button until the Apple logo appears; It can sometimes take more than 10 seconds, so be patient

A soft reset of all settings on your iPhone is a good step to try to resolve a problem. This is a happy medium between a simple reboot and losing all your data, although you should know which settings you will need to redo after the reset. Network settings (i.e. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth), all Apple Pay cards, location and privacy permissions you’ve given to apps and websites, display and sound settings (like your wallpaper, alarms, ringtones, and Liquid Glass settings), and any words your keyboard has learned over time will all be reset.

To clear all these settings from your phone, follow these steps:

1. Go to Settings

2. Select General

3. Select Transfer or reset iPhone

4. Select Reset

5. Choose the settings to delete; For complete erasing of settings, select Reset all settings. Or fine-tune your selection depending on why you’re resetting (if you’re resetting because of network issues, for example, you might select Reset network settings).

As a last resort when troubleshooting, or if you are getting rid of your iPhone, you can perform a hard reset of the device, which will completely erase all data on the device. For iPhone problems that seem unsolvable, sometimes the solution is to start from scratch. It is recommended, before doing this, to create an iCloud backup of your device for security. To initiate a factory reset, you need to make sure you know your Apple account password and phone passcode, then follow these steps:

1. Go to Settings

2. Select General

3. Select Transfer or reset iPhone

4. Select Erase all content and settingsthen hits Continue

5. Choose either keep or delete your eSIM; if you delete it, you will need to reactivate your plan with your mobile operator

6. Enter your iPhone password and Apple passwordthen watch all your data be erased.