New features

Backup utility

We added a utility to make a backup of the Persistent Storage to another Tails USB stick.

This utility automates the process described until now in our documentation on making a backup of your Persistent Storage, which used the command line.

Thanks a lot to David A. Wheeler for sending us the initial code!

It's pretty basic and we still want to do something better in #7049, but we didn't want to wait more because we know that backups are a big issue for our users.

External Hard Disk

We added a new entry called Tails (External Hard Disk) to the GRUB boot loader.

You can use it to start Tails from an external hard disk or one of the few USB sticks that used to return the following error when starting Tails:

Unable to find a medium containing a live file system

Changes and updates

• Update Tor Browser to 11.0.2.

• Update Tor to 0.4.6.8.

• Add a shortcut to restart Tails when the Unsafe Browser was not enabled in the Welcome Screen.

• Add a link from the error screen of the Tor Connection assistant to our documentation on troubleshooting connecting to Tor.

Fixed problems

For more details, read our changelog.

• Fix the display problems in the Unsafe Browser. (#18668)

Known issues

• Remove the guest additions of VirtualBox. (#18643)

  This breaks the support for mouse pointer integration, shared folders, and shared clipboard.

  The VirtualBox guest additions are badly maintained in Debian and not compatible anymore with some recent updates in Debian. We will add them back as soon as the packages in Debian work again in Tails.

See the list of long-standing issues.

Get Tails 4.25

To upgrade your Tails USB stick and keep your persistent storage

• Automatic upgrades are broken from Tails 4.14 and earlier.

  Follow our instructions to do an automatic upgrade from Tails 4.15, Tails 4.16, Tails 4.17, or Tails 4.18.

• Automatic upgrades are available from Tails 4.19 or later to 4.25.

  You can reduce the size of the download of future automatic upgrades by doing a manual upgrade to the latest version.

• If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if Tails fails to start after an automatic upgrade, please try to do a manual upgrade.

To install Tails on a new USB stick

Follow our installation instructions:

• Install from Windows
• Install from macOS
• Install from Linux

To download only

If you don't need installation or upgrade instructions, you can download Tails 4.25 directly:

• For USB sticks (USB image)
• For DVDs and virtual machines (ISO image)

What's coming up?

Tails 4.26 is scheduled for January 11.