Will photos, addresses be erased when porting from Virgin to Public?

[elhota1]

If I port from my old Virgin SIM card to Public, will all the photos, addresses, information on my phone all be deleted?   I would like to port my old number from Virgin to my new one in Public.

Or should I be getting a new phone and number for Public and just keep my old number and SIM card on my old phone in order to keep all the photos, addresses and information?

[Yummy]

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@elhota1 wrote:

If I port from my old Virgin SIM card to Public, will all the photos, addresses, information on my phone all be deleted?   I would like to port my old number from Virgin to my new one in Public.

Or should I be getting a new phone and number for Public and just keep my old number and SIM card on my old phone in order to keep all the photos, addresses and information?

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You are not not porting 'SIM card. You are transferring only phone number to different provider.

BUT! if you keep your contacts and SMS on SIM then it is better to transfer them to phone's internal storage before you throw away old SIM card.

Remember when initiating porting, keep your old SIM to receive SMS from old provider, answer YES within 90 minutes to confirm porting request.

[BKNS27]

@elhota1 

No you will not loss photo or contacts on your phone.

If you are worried about losing them, you can always backup on google photos or what app you have on your phone.

[Anonymous]

 @computergeek541 : Right. Non-destructive. Until you hastily throw out the SIM in a huff of leaving that provider immediately after confirming while saying good riddance and then realize afterwards that you've lost some data. 🙂

[computergeek541]

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@Anonymous wrote:

 @elhota1 : Other than those possible resets affecting the phone overall, only contacts and SMS can be stored on the SIM itself. I don't imagine most people do that anymore but check on the current device your current SIM is in to see if those settings were set.

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That is a good point about contacts being saved on SIM cards. To be quite honest, I don't even know how to do that any longer on current smartphones. Saving contact information in that manner from what I saw was limited to one phone number per contact (you had to create an multiples entries if someone had more than one phone number), and the limit of phone numbers that could be saved was relatively low (usually a few hundred). 

The actual number porting itself wouldn't delete any of the SMS messages or phone numbers saved on the old carrier's SIM card if any of these were saved on that SIM card. The customer could simply re-insert the old SIM card if some of that information was still needed.

[Anonymous]

 @elhota1 : Other than those possible resets affecting the phone overall, only contacts and SMS can be stored on the SIM itself. I don't imagine most people do that anymore but check on the current device your current SIM is in to see if those settings were set.

[Twopennybuffalo]

Just note if the phone is older and locked (android) it can trigger a reset android 9 and below. 

newer phones 2018 or newer and Apple devices will never reset due to swapping the sim. I just had this happen back with a note 5 and S7 before all phones were unlocked for good.

Enjoy public mobile…it’s really good to save money and have a stellar plan.

[computergeek541 · Accepted solution]

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@elhota1 wrote:

If I port from my old Virgin SIM card to Public, will all the photos, addresses, information on my phone all be deleted?   I would like to port my old number from Virgin to my new one in Public.

Or should I be getting a new phone and number for Public and just keep my old number and SIM card on my old phone in order to keep all the photos, addresses and information?

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Transfering your phone number in isn't related to your photos or other user content on your phone. You should be fine. There are rare cases that some phones perform a factory reset (specifically Samsung) after inserting a different SIM card, but that isn't the norm and it's not actually supposed to happen.  My advice would be to always have your information and user content backed up, but the number porting procedure doesn't actually touch any of your files.