Originally Posted by
rayz336 It's restoring your iPhone or iPad as a new device using iTunes if I'm not mistaken. There's some benefit to it if you have a bunch of extra stuff on your iPhone that you'd like to get rid of quickly.
Yep, that's pretty much it in a nutshell. You'd be surprised at how well your device can run or how many issues are fixed with a clean install. Just put the device in DFU mode, connect it to iTunes, and when iTunes detect the device in recovery, select to restore it. It'll download a fresh copy of the latest iOS version for your device. When complete, I set my device up as new, however, it's okay to restore from a previous backup - specifically, the backup you make prior to restoring the device.