Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
First things first: what is Tails. Well, Tails (or TAILS) stands for The Amnesic Incognito Live System. Or, as they say on the site: Tails is a live operating system, that you can start on almost any computer – from a DVD, USB stick, or SD card. It aims at preserving your privacy and anonymity.
In short: Tails will boot from DVD/USB; while you’re online, it’ll keep you as anonymous as possible, and, on exit, leave no trace of what you were doing.
Thankfully, though, you can save data to an encrypted persistent volume on a USB stick.
Burning Before Installing
Before you can put Tails on a USB, you need to have Tails up and running. This means, in my case anyway, burning it to a bootable DVD.
Head over to https://tails.boum.org/, download the latest ISO image, and burn it to a blank DVD.
Once you have Tails on a bootable DVD, you can pop it into your machine and boot from it.
On booting, you’ll be asked if you require more options (tick NO), choose your language at the bottom of the screen, and click ‘Login’.
Now you’re in Tails. You can, of course, just play around in here doing whatever you want. But you’ve nowhere to save any files to. Which is fine if you’re just browsing, or checking email. To save files, we’ll need that persistent volume, and we can get that only by using this live boot to install Tails to a USB stick.
Tails to USB
Pop a USB stick into your machine. For a persistent volume, with Tails, you’ll need a stick larger than 4GB. I’m using an 8GB stick in this example.
In your live boot, go to Applications > Tails > Tails Installer.
From the window that opens, choose ‘Clone & Install’.
If you have more than one USB device in your machine, this is where you choose which device to install Tails to.
Click ‘Install Tails’ and wait for a few minutes while your USB stick is partitioned, formatted, and has Tails copied to it.
Once that’s done, click OK.
You now have a bootable USB with Tails.
Use the power button icon at the top right of the screen to shut down (or reboot) Tails, but be sure to remove the DVD first – we want to boot from the USB this time.
In The USB
So, we’re back to the ‘More Options’ window again. This time I need to choose YES as my WiFi is not detected by most Linux distros and I need to run a SUDO command to activate it.
By default you cannot run admin/sudo commands in Tails as this would compromise your security. Choosing YES lets you choose an admin password.
And, yes, you can even camouflage it as Windows 8 with a Windows background and Windows ‘start’ button.
Enter a password you want to use for admin commands in this boot, and click ‘Login’.
So, I ran my SUDO command, got my WiFi working, and it’s connected to the Internet.
After a few moments, Tails will display a system message that ‘Tor is ready’ and will display the Tor onion logo.* Anything you do in your browser from now on is done through Tor.
Persistent Volume
To get a persistent volume we need to go to Applications > Tails > Configure persistent volume. In this window, you need to enter a passphrase which is used only for the persistent volume. This is completely separate from the admin/sudo password we used earlier.
Click ‘Create’ to continue. Now we come to the ‘Persistence Wizard’ which determines what will be allowed on the persistent volume. Choosing ‘Personal Data’ means you’ll have a folder to put what you want on there. Choosing bookmarks means anything you bookmark will be saved and available on next boot. Same with all the other options in the wizard.
When you’re happy with those things, click Save.
And that’s that! Reboot Tails to have your persistent drive available.
Tails & Persistence
On booting from the USB stick, you’ll see the usual ‘more options’, but also a new ‘use persistence?’ option. Clicking YES for that will ask for the passphrase used when creating the volume.
Now, finally, you have Tails with a persistent volume. To see your space, open the HOME folder.
You’ll see folders named Persistent and Tor Browser. This is a bit confusing and took a bit of Googling to find this out – the Tor Browser folder you see in /home is only for the browser, and anything you save in here will be wiped on exit. Inside the Persistent folder is another Tor Browser folder. This folder will NOT be wiped, and is where you should save your files. Saving files anywhere else is, technically, possible, but you won’t be able to access those files in any apps. Confusing, I know, but in short: /home/Tor Browser = temporary /home/Persistent/Tor Browser = permanent
As ever, be careful out there as – even with Tor (and the like) – I still don’t trust it to be 100% anonymous.
Further Reading:
https://tails.boum.org/doc/about/warning/index.en.html - Tails Warning page. PLEASE READ!
https://tails.boum.org/doc/index.en.html - Tails Documentation