Having a broken or damaged phone is indeed frustrating, especially since it has become an essential part of your life.
While you can choose to live with these issues, they might worsen and end up ruining your phone completely. Ideally, when you notice that there’s something wrong with your phone, you should have it inspected by a professional immediately for underlying issues.
Moreover, you should look for the authorized repair center of your phone brand. However, they tend to be more expensive than a general phone repair shop. If you’d like to save a few bucks, you can try typing in ‘iPad repair near me‘ on your browser and see a list of stores that can fix your broken device.
Moreover, before you decide to bring your phone in for repair, you need to prepare your device to avoid losing files. Listed below are the ways on how you can prepare your phone for repair:
1. Back-Up Your Files
As you surrender your phone to a repair center, you’ll be informed about the fixes they need to perform on your phone. In some cases, they might need to reformat your phone, causing you to lose all your files. Be informed that they might not be able to restore them.
In case of a phone reformat, you should have a backup of files you have in your phone and save them on your computer. This way, you won’t be too stressed out when the repair center deletes all of your files. All you have to do once you’re home from the shop is to restore your files to your phone, and use your newly repaired phone as you wish. However, you should only keep this data if the issue on your phone isn’t caused by a file virus.
2. Remove Your Passcode
Even if you’re planning to bring your phone to an authorized repair center, you can’t expect them to look for ways to bypass your passcode. Before you send in your phone, they will ask you to remove your passcode for easier operation. While you can always give them the code, it can get quite inconvenient when they forget it or lose the paper you wrote your code on.
Thus, it would be best to remove all the codes from your phone temporarily to avoid the hassle.
3. Unlink Your Phone From Your Accounts
As you send in your phone to a repair center, you’ll never know what they’ll be doing while repairing it. While a professional company can guarantee that they will not be invading your privacy, you can never be too careful.
Before you hand over your device, you should unlink all of your accounts, including your email, messengers, social media accounts, or any application that that has your personal and confidential information. This way, you can guarantee that no one can get through your accounts, open your files, or worse, hack into your profile.
4. Remove Your Sim Card
Phone repairs typically take days or weeks before the phones are returned to the owner. Thus, you may need to use a different phone to contact and connect with other people.
You should remove your sim card from your damaged phone and transfer it to another working phone. This way, you can still use your number while your phone is under repair. Sim cards are compatible with almost all mobile devices, so you don’t have to worry about losing contact with people.
5. Remove Phone Accessories
Apart from removing your phone’s sim card, you should also remove your phone accessories such as the phone cover, case, keychain, stickers, and more. Most shops will also ask you to remove these as they might lose them in the process.
Ideally, you should remove every accessory and place them inside a safe container. You can simply attach them back once the repairman returns your phone.
6. Take Out External Storage
Once you send your phone in for repair, they won’t need the external storage that contains all your personal files. Repair shops, more often than not, will ask their customers to remove the external storage to protect their privacy and avoid losing it.
To ensure data security, you should remove your external storage and store it in a safe place to prevent it from getting lost – especially since it’s small and difficult to find. You can simply put the external storage back to your phone if the damage isn’t caused by a file virus. Otherwise, you should also have your external storage checked for problems.
7. Disable ‘Find My iPhone’
If you’re an iPhone user, you might have ‘Find my iPhone’ enabled on your device. This feature allows you to track your phone in case you lose it. Through this, you won’t have to worry about where your phone is, since you can always determine its location through GPS tracking.
The reason you need to turn off the feature is to help Apple verify whether you’re the legal owner of the device. Moreover, enabling that feature may prevent the repairmen from accessing important features of your phone. Turning this feature off will also allow them to reinstall your iOS if they need to remove it in the meantime.
Some people might not be comfortable with the idea of turning the ‘Find my iPhone’ feature off, since they fear that the repairman might run away with their phones. If you feel uncomfortable about it, you can bring your phone to an authorized service center to guarantee your phone’s safety.
Conclusion
No matter the severity of the damage, having a broken phone can be frustrating. You should immediately bring your phone to a repair center once you notice something off so its condition won’t worsen any further. However, before surrendering your phone to the repair shop, you should take some necessary measures to ensure data security and protection. It will also help hasten the repair process since everything will run smoothly. While the period of repairs may vary depending on the damage, having your phone repaired may be a better option than buying a new phone which may cost way more than the repair price.