How to factory reset a PS4 to fix issues or for resale

As with most tech products, it's sometimes necessary to factory reset your PlayStation 4 console. This can be due to a number of reasons, especially if your PS4 system is acting wonky. Other times, you might simply need to factory reset the machine if you plan of selling it or giving it away.

There are two methods for resetting your PS4:

From the PlayStation 4 dashboard
From the PS4's Safe Mode

We’ll be going over both ways in this article. Read on to find out how to factory reset your PlayStation 4 system. If you're looking for information on how to reset a newer system, check out our article on how to factory reset a PS5.

Difficulty

Easy

Duration

2 hours

What You Need

PlayStation 4

How to factory reset your PS4

We'll go into detail about each step later in this section, but here's how to factory reset your PS4 via your console's dashboard:

Go to settings and select Account Management
Select Deactivate and select Yes on the following screen
Sign back into your account and head back to the settings
From the Settings menu. Click on Initialization.
Select Initialize PS4. The full reset may take a couple hours or more.

A factory reset is usually done as a last resort to ensure the functionality of the system. Before factory resetting, it’s important to remember to back up all save data you may have before initiating the process. Factory resetting the PlayStation will erase all of your data from your system, and not backing up your save data will result in you having to start your games from scratch.

Things to consider backing up include images, saves, and videos, which can either be uploaded to an external device or to the cloud. In order to back up data using the cloud, you’ll have to have a PlayStation Plus account, which gives you 100GB of storage space. However, you can also use a flash drive to copy saves if you aren’t a