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Early Amazon Kindle Fire HD users have been rooting their tablets and making other changes almost as long as the 7 inch tablet’s been available. But since the Kindle Fire HD has a locked bootloader, there’s no way to install a custom recovery that lets you completely backup or restore your device in case anything goes wrong.

Enter Kinfaun’s backup.sh script. It’s designed to basically clone your healthy device so that if anything goes wrong you can restore from that backup. It won’t save all of your personal data, so you may need to set up your Kindle Fire HD again after restoring from a backup — but it might help you restore a device that no longer boots.

In order to use the script you’ll need to have a rooted Kindle Fire HD and at least 550MB of free storage space. The script will create a new backup directory and save copies of your disk partitions to that directory.

You’ll need to connect your Kindle to a PC and run a few adb commands to create the backup. The restore process works much the same way — but you’ll need to be able to get your Kindle Fire HD into fastboot mode. That might require a factory cable which you can buy or make yourself.

If you haven’t already backed up your device, but find yourself with a Kindle Fire HD that won’t boot, you can try Onemeila’s Kindle Fire HD System.img Recovery Tool.

This also requires you to get your Kindle Fire HD into fastboot mode — but it includes a factory system image. Put simply, it overwrites whatever changes you’ve accidentally made to your file system so that your Kindle Fire HD ends up running the same software it came with.

Again — neither of these tools will help you get your tablet back to the state it was in yesterday, before you accidentally deleted some important file that your Kindle Fire HD needs to boot. But they both may let you get your device up and running again with the help of a $15 cable… which is a lot cheaper than replacing a $199 tablet.