There are several ways of shutting down Tails:

  • By clicking on the system menu located in the upper right corner of the screen and choosing either:

    • Shutdown
icon to shutdown the computer or

    • Restart
icon to restart the computer.

  • By physically removing the USB stick or DVD that Tails is running from.

    Only physically remove the USB stick in case of emergency as doing so can sometimes break the file system of the Persistent Storage.

    If you cannot unlock the Persistent Storage anymore after physically removing the USB stick, try to do a file system check on the Persistent Storage to fix it.

When you shut down Tails, all the data stored in RAM is erased to protect you from cold boot attacks.