How to soft and hard reset your iPhone

Is your iPhone acting up. Let’s walk through the different kinds of resets, what they do and how to perform them. How to soft and hard reset your iPhone.

Big Tech Apple How to soft and hard reset your iPhone If your phone’s acting up or you’re transferring it to someone else, you’ll need to reset it. Before you resort to taking your phone in for repairs, consider some basic troubleshooting at home. The tech community at large has long been split about the specific definitions of soft and hard resetting.

To some, a soft reset means restarting a device, while a hard reset is a complete factory reset that erases all data. To others, a factory reset is a completely separate concept, and instead the difference between a soft and hard reset is whether a restart was done through a device’s menus or by cutting the power manually. To add even more confusion, where does clearing your settings, but not erasing all of your data, land on this scale.

It can all get very convoluted, and there’s no definitive answer. For the sake of this article, we’ll be looking at three types of useful resets under the following definitions: Restarting: Rebooting your phone without losing any data Soft Reset: Clearing all settings without wiping out data Hard Reset: A complete reset of the phone, erasing all data How to force restart your iPhone Restarting your phone can be beneficial for myriad reasons, and it’s often the best first step to iPhone troubleshooting — the old recommendation of turning something off and on again is always a good place to start.