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.

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

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

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

In the **About Tails** utility, you can click **Check for Upgrades** to check whether a new version of Tails is available. This check is also done automatically every time you start Tails and connect to the Tor network.

- A Tails USB stick

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

- If an error occurs while installing the upgrade, *Tails Upgrader* asks you to visit:

If another error occur while upgrading or if your Tails USB stick fails to start after an automatic upgrade, we recommend that you do a manual upgrade instead. See below.

there is not enough free space on the Tails system partition

<p>You can also do a manual upgrade to reduce the size of future automatic
upgrades.</p>

<p>When doing automatic upgrades, the size of the download increases over time.
If you do a manual upgrade, the size of future automatic upgrades will become
smaller again.</p>

<p>We estimated that, to actually reduce the
overall download size, it's only worth it to do 1 manual upgrade every year if
you apply all upgrades of Tails.</p>

To do a manual upgrade, you can either:

- [[Download and upgrade|doc/upgrade/#download]] (below)

- [[Burn a new Tails DVD|install/dvd]]

You need:

- Your Tails USB stick

Another empty USB stick <small>(at least 8 GB)</small>&nbsp;[[!toggle id="why_extra" text="Why?"]]

½ hour to download Tails (<small class="remove-extra-space">[[!inline pages="inc/stable_amd64_iso_size" raw="yes" sort="age"]]</small>)