New features

Data deletion when deactivating a feature of the Persistent Storage

After you turn off a feature of the Persistent Storage, you can now click the Delete Data button to delete the data stored for this feature.

Persistent Storage settings with message:
Persistent Folder. The data of this feature is still saved. Delete Data?

Passphrase suggestion when creating the Persistent Storage

When creating the Persistent Storage, a random and very secure passphrase is now displayed as a suggestion:

We recommend a long passphrase of 5 to 7 random words. For example: Ella Grim Inca Brief Facts Panda

This passphrase uses the diceware method to give very strong security guarantees while being possible to memorize.

For example, a six-word passphrase like we suggest would take 3 505 years to crack at a trillion guesses a second.

Learn more about the maths in The Intercept: Passphrases That You Can Memorize — But That Even the NSA Can’t Guess.

Changes and updates

  • Update Tor Browser to 12.0.5.

  • Update the Linux kernel to 6.1.20. This improves the support for newer hardware: graphics, Wi-Fi, and so on.

  • Use a new icon for the backup utility for the Persistent Storage.

Fixed problems

We fixed several reliability issues with the Persistent Storage:

  • We improved the error message when a feature of the Persistent Storage fails to activate from the Welcome Screen to clarify which feature is affected.

    Welcome Screen with error
message: Failed to activate some features of the Persistent Storage:
Persistent Folder.

    After starting Tails, the feature that failed to activate is marked as such in the Persistent Storage settings. You can try turning the feature off and on again or deleting its data to reset it entirely.

    Persistent Storage settings with
error message: Persistent Folder. Activation failed. Try again.

  • We made the activation of the Persistent Storage more reliable in 2 error cases. (#19376 and #19331)

  • We added a progress indicator while turning on a new feature to clarify that it can take some time. (#19291)

  • We made sure that all data that is already available in Tails is really copied to the USB stick when turning on a feature. (#19368)

For more details, read our changelog.

Known issues

None specific to this release.

See the list of long-standing issues.

Get Tails 5.12

To upgrade your Tails USB stick and keep your persistent storage

  • Automatic upgrades are available from Tails 5.0 or later to 5.12.

    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:

The Persistent Storage on the USB stick will be lost if you install instead of upgrading.

To download only

If you don't need installation or upgrade instructions, you can download Tails 5.12 directly: