Published on January 16th, 2017 | by Sunit Nandi

iMyFone Umate Pro review: secure erase your iPhone, iPod or iPad

Introduction

Friends, ever bought a iPhone, iPad or iPod with 16 or 32 GB of storage and realised it was a big blunder? With growing sizes of movies, music and apps, its nearly impossible to handle a device with that range of storage space. Also temporary files and logs fill up space very fast. One needs to manage storage for such devices with care.

Also there are cases when you plan to give or sell your phone to someone else. You would definitely prefer that your privacy stays intact. Deleting files from the device or doing a factory reset just removes them from the file system index. Any person with cyber forensic tools will be able to recover them. This is where secure erasing comes handy by removing all traces of the files from your device.

Today, we bring to you a solution to these problems: iMyFone Umate Pro. Thanks to the team at iMyFone, we have been able to procure a pro license in order to present before you a review. We hope you enjoy the review.

What is iMyFone Umate Pro?

iMyFone Umate Pro is a Windows and Mac app that frees up storage on your iOS device as well as secure erases them. It claims to handle junk files, temporary files, large files and apps.

Junk files are files like system and crash logs, which fill up the device as time progresses. But if you are not a developer or power user, you will not need them. Temporary files include caches like browser caches, app caches, download caches (including paused or failed downloads) and the like. Caches can grow over time if the app does not have an upper bound on the cache space. Also, if you have stopped using an app, the cache will stay on the storage unless you remove it. Deleting the cache has no adverse impact because the app will rebuild its cache the next time it runs.

iMyFone Umate Pro claims that it doesn’t your delete images and videos. Instead it losslessly compresses them and backs up the originals to your computer. The amount of space you would space depends on the redundancy present in the media files. In some cases you could save up to 75%.

Getting started

Getting started with iMyFone Umate Pro is easy. You can download it from their website. After that you need to double-click the installer on Windows. On a Mac, you need to mount the DMG and copy the app to /Applications.

Once the app is installed, you can launch it. If you have a license key already with you, you can click “register now” on the first run.

Once everything is complete, you’ll be greeted with a home screen that will ask you to connect your device to the computer.

Usage and experience

Once your iOS device is connected, you’ll have the option of 4 operations to perform on it, represented as 4 tabs: “1-Click Free Up Space”, “Erase All Data”, “Erase Deleted Files” and “Erase Private Files”.

The “1-Click Free Up Space” tab initiates a scan for files present on the iOS device. After the scan is complete, it gives you a brief report of what files can cleaned to free up storage space.

The in my case, the junk files section shows that 65.42 MB can be freed. So I choose that and after that we can see that crash logs occupy 26.86 MB and download temp files occupy 38.56 MB of space. Clicking “Clean” immediately frees up the storage.

The large files section has images and videos that can be losslessly compressed to save space. The originals can be either backed up or not, depending on your choice.

Then we have the apps section. It is not something very special, as it can be done from your device. But it does provide a quick interface to batch delete apps you no longer use.

The “Erase All Data” tab is exactly like the factory reset except that it secure erases all data.

The “Erase Deleted Files” tab secure erases remnants of files in storage that are already deleted by the user. This feature was found to be a hit and miss because sometimes it was detecting files and sometimes not.

The “Erase Private Data” tab scans and secure erases contacts, identity and location data from your device.

Overall I found the user interface to be very beautiful and the user experience is superb. The bug in the “Erase Deleted Files” tab was the only off-putting issue I found in this tool.

Getting for yourself and pricing

iMyFone Umate Pro costs $29.95 from the developer’s website. You can download a free trial to see if it works for you. The trial version lets you scan your iPhone to see how much space you can save. It will also remove junk files once, compress the latest five photos and remove one app. For the full set of features, you will need to buy a license.

You can buy a copy of iMyFone Umate Pro from here: Windows | Mac

Summary

Pros

Easy to use
Works as intended

Cons

Minor bug in “Erase Deleted Files” feature

Conclusion

iMyFone Umate Pro is a space-saving and secure erasing solution for iOS devices that work just the way it is intended. Unlike majority of the apps which promise the moon and deliver peanuts instead, iMyFone Umate Pro actually lives up to its claims. While it isn’t free, it pays for itself when you consider the price difference of your current device with the same device with a higher capacity or the amount of mental stress and monetary loss if you identity or data gets stolen.

Rating: 9/10

So what are you waiting for? Do try it out.

Tags: iMyFone, iPad, iPhone, iPod, Pro, secure erase, Umate

About the Author

Sunit Nandi I'm the leader of Techno FAQ. Also an engineering college student with immense interest in science and technology. Other interests include literature, coin collecting, gardening and photography. Always wish to live life like there's no tomorrow.