Tips for Tuesday: Wipe your BlackBerry’s data

Sometimes it just needs to be done. Perhaps your BlackBerry has been running extra sluggishly and you don’t know the cause. Maybe something’s wonky and every possible solution hasn’t worked. Or maybe you’re just getting rid of your BlackBerry and want to wipe it clean of your personal information. Whatever the reason, you never know when you’ll run into a situation where you want to wipe your device. Thankfully, RIM has made this super simple in BlackBerry 7. To perform your data wipe, go to Options – Security – Security Wipe. By default, the Emails, Contacts, etc. box is checked. That will ensure that your personal information gets wiped from the device. When selling your device, this is pretty important. On the other hand, if you just want to clear the clutter from your device you might want to uncheck this box. That way you can keep your personal information in tact. If that doesn’t work, you can always go back and wipe that information later. Alternatively, you can wipe your personal information without wiping applications. There’s a separate check box for user-installed applications. There’s also a check box for your media card. That can be useful in some instances, but since media cards are reusable, and since some of that data can be read by other devices, I’m presuming most people will want to keep them in tact. But, again, you can use the Security Wipe feature to only knock out the data on your SD card if you so choose. Once you’ve chosen which items you’d like to wipe, scroll to the bottom and type blackberry in the box. Then click Wipe Data and it’s all gone. It’s as simple as that.

About the Author

Joe Pawlikowski is the Senior Editor at MobileMoo.com and has been covering the mobile industry full time since 2007. When he's not writing about the tech scene, he can be found discussing his personal love - baseball (and more specifically the New York Yankees) as well as writing on his personal blog.