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 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.
<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>
<span class="hide">[[!toggle id="why_extra" text=""]]</span> <p>It is currently impossible to manually upgrade a Tails USB stick while running from itself. This scenario requires creating an intermediary Tails on another USB stick, from which to upgrade your Tails.</p>