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:

  • to shutdown the computer or

  • 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.

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