Rooting was the last thing I was going for too. I heard it gives full control to your device and full access to private data but is quite risky, you'll likely lose the warranty of your phone and one misstep can lead the phone turning into a "brick".
Oh well... um...
It's also not something to do without making sure you understand the process - which is always to some extent specific to the model of phone.
And because it usually affects warranty status (and on some phones, particularly Samsung, there may be no way of undoing it that removes evidence that it had been done, which may itself be enough to refuse warranty support), and also because some apps won't work on rooted phones (many media apps, almost all banking or mobile payment apps), it's really not fair to do it to a phone that you are about to pass on (in some cases there are workarounds for this, but that's more stuff to learn in very little time).
Basically I would not recommend this at this point unless you already know what you are doing and how to undo it (which for root itself means "reflash the phone with a new set of official firmware") and unless the recipient is happy with you doing that (because you probably can't do anything about the warranty status - even reflashing to stock won't fix that). And, as noted, for many devices the process of rooting will involve a factory reset of the phone, which will destroy the data you are trying to save (and no, you won't be able to recover them, for several reasons), and for some devices, especially many US Samsung models, there just isn't a way of doing it. So overall I don't think that root is a reasonable solution at this point, I only mentioned it because it would be the only remaining way I know.
.
No glitches 
