[[!meta title="Upgrading a Tails USB stick"]]

Tails includes an automatic mechanism to upgrade a USB stick to the latest version of Tails. When an automatic upgrade is performed, only an *upgrade package* is downloaded. The upgrade package contains all the changes made to Tails since Tails was first installed or was last manually upgraded.

In some cases, it is impossible to do an **automatic upgrade** and you might have to do a **manual upgrade**. This page describes both techniques.

<p>Your Persistent Storage will be preserved by both automatic and
manual upgrades.</p>

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If you use Tails from a DVD, you need to [[burn a new DVD|install/dvd]].

[[!toc levels=2]]

<h1 id="check-version">Checking which version of Tails you are currently running</h1>

<h1 id="automatic">Automatic upgrade using <i>Tails Upgrader</i></h1>

The advantages of automatic upgrades are the following:

The upgrade mechanism includes cryptographic verification of the upgrade. You don't have to verify the USB image yourself anymore.

[[!img upgrader_automatic.png class="screenshot" alt=""]]

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<h2 id="troubleshooting">Troubleshooting</h2>

[[file:///usr/share/doc/tails/website/doc/upgrade/error/install.en.html|upgrade/error/install]]

<h1 id="manual">Manual upgrade using <i>Tails Cloner</i></h1>

It might not always be possible to do an automatic upgrade as described [[above|upgrade#automatic]]. For example, when:

The automatic upgrade is impossible for technical reasons (not enough memory, not enough free space on the USB stick, and so on). For example, if you get the following error message:

there is not enough free space on the Tails system partition

You want to upgrade by cloning from another Tails USB stick which is already up-to-date, for example, when working offline or with a slow Internet connection.