By encrypting your data, anyone who gets ahold of your phone won’t be able to access your photos, data, downloads, etc.

Your phone will ask you to confirm the reset a few times so you don’t accidentally reset your phone. It is possible for IT specialists who have sophisticated software to recover files unless you encrypted them before resetting the phone.

If you’ve got data that you don’t want to lose, you can back up your phone and save the content to your Google Drive or Google Photos Library. Remember, encrypt the phone if you don’t want anyone to be able to access your files after you’ve reset it. [7] X Research source

Although you won’t easily be able to see the data, downloads, and content after you’ve reset the phone, IT specialists can access the files using sophisticated software. A hard reset is a good option if you’re trying to fix a problem with your phone or you’ve run out of memory. If a hard reset doesn’t fix the problem, you could do a factory reset to start over with a blank slate.

Your Samsung phone will turn off and reboot itself. This process takes longer if you’ve got a lot of data, but if there’s not much on your phone, it should take just a few minutes.

This resets the system. You may be asked to reboot, in which case, just select “reboot system now. " The amount of time this takes depends on how much data is on your phone. Bixby is the Samsung intelligence assistant that you can call up using the button on the left side of the phone below the volume buttons.