Rekreate

A utility for backing up and restoring books, thumbnails and content catalogue data (collections, progress) in Kindle devices.

This can be used to transfer the content between different Kindles, as well as for backing up the current Kindle's content, and restore it after something like a factory reset.

Usage

$ ./rekreate --help
Usage of backup:
  -excludecollection value
        Case-insensitive match of collections to ignore. Can be called
        multiple times.
  -excludepath value
        Glob path of documents to ignore. Can be called multiple times. Wrap
        in single quotes. Used in combination with default paths unless
        disabled, see no-default-path-exclusions
  -no-default-path-exclusions
        Disable default path exclusions. Use excludepath for custom paths

Usage of restore:
  -no-db
        Don't import the content catalogue data
  -no-documents
        Don't import documents
  -no-thumbnails
        Don't import thumbnails

Backing up

This might take some minutes, more depending on how big your library is. Let it run and don't cancel it. If WARN logs are printed, you may ignore them.

With default options, back up everything:

$ ./rekreate backup
2026/01/03 23:01:57 Creating temporary export directory...
2026/01/03 23:01:57 Exporting content catalogue partial DB...
2026/01/03 23:02:04 Exporting thumbnails...
2026/01/03 23:02:06 Exporting documents...
2026/01/03 23:04:41 Readying the export...
2026/01/03 23:04:41 Done exporting! Find it in rekreate_20260103-230441.tar.gz

You may exclude specific documents from being backed up. You should use glob expressions to ignore the book and sidecars, use single quotes to avoid shell expansion:

# 1. Ignore a whole directory
# 2. Ignore a specific file
# 3. Ignore a specific book and its sidecar (important to keep extension open)
$ ./rekreate backup \
--excludepath 'documents/Dick, Philip_K/' \
--excludepath 'documents/KUAL.kual' \
--excludepath 'documents/Scott, Lynch/Lies of Locke Lamora, The - Scott Lynch.*'

Certain paths are automatically excluded by default, look up DefaultExclusions in the codebase to find the always up to date list, but as of writing, these are:

'/mnt/us/documents/My Clippings*'
'/mnt/us/documents/dictionaries/'
'/mnt/us/documents/Downloads/'
'/mnt/us/documents/*.kol'
'/mnt/us/documents/*.kual'

If you don't want these default exclusions, you can pass in -no-default-path-exclusions and pass your own exclusions with -excludepath.

Collections can be excluded with -excludecollection option, which can be passed multiple times. These are a case-insensitive match:

$ ./rekreate backup --excludecollection dev --excludecollection 'Gentleman Bastard'

All together:

$ ./rekreate backup \
--no-default-path-exclusions \
--excludepath 'documents/custom_book.*' --excludepath 'documents/dictionaries/' \
--excludecollection dev --excludecollection sprawl --excludecollection 'abc 1'

Once the program has finished, a file like rekreate_20260103-230441.tar.gz will be created in the same path rekreate was executed from. Copy this file over to your target Kindle.

Restoring

By default everything (books, thumbnails, content catalogue) gets restored. This might also take some minutes depending on your library size, let it run until it ends:

$ ./rekreate restore rekreate_20260103-230441.tar.gz
2026/01/03 22:26:46 Creating temporary import directory...
2026/01/03 22:26:46 Opening backup file...
2026/01/03 22:26:46 Extracting partial DB...
2026/01/03 22:26:46 Backing up existing content catalogue DB...
2026/01/03 22:26:46 Connecting to content catalogue DB...
2026/01/03 22:26:46 Importing content catalogue data...
2026/01/03 22:27:05 Importing thumbnails...
2026/01/03 22:27:22 Importing documents...
2026/01/03 22:29:03 Done importing! Give it some seconds for all the content
to appear in the home screen

You can disable each of these parts with one or many of the corresponding flags. If you pass all of them, then nothing will be imported:

# Example of only importing the content catalogue data
$ ./rekreate restore --no-documents --no-thumbnails rekreate_20260103-230441.tar.gz