Everything you do disappears automatically when you shut down Tails.

But you can save some of your files and configuration in an encrypted Persistent Storage on your Tails USB stick, for example:

• Your documents

• Your Wi-Fi passwords

• Your browser bookmarks

• ...

The Persistent Storage is an encrypted partition protected by a passphrase that occupies all the free space left on the USB stick.

Everything in the Persistent Storage is encrypted automatically.

You can choose to unlock your Persistent Storage or not each time you start Tails.

• Introduction to the Persistent Storage

  • Creating the Persistent Storage

  • Configuring the Persistent Storage

  • Unlocking and using the Persistent Storage

  • Making a backup of your Persistent Storage

  • Deleting the Persistent Storage

• Installing additional software

  • Converting dangerous documents to safe PDFs using Dangerzone

• Advanced topics on the Persistent Storage

  • Changing the passphrase of the Persistent Storage

  • Opening your Persistent Storage from another operating system

  • Recovering data from the Persistent Storage

    • Recovering data from the Persistent Storage when Tails doesn't start

    • Recovering data from the Persistent Storage when it has file system errors

How strong is the encryption of the Persistent Storage?

The encryption of the Persistent Storage uses LUKS and DMCrypt.

LUKS and DMCrypt are the standard system for disk encryption in Linux. Tails uses their default encryption parameters, which are considered highly secure. This is the same technique as we recommend for creating and using encrypted volumes in general.