Motivation

So this is probably a strange request but I really want to do this. For some reason, when I restored the WhatsApp chats most of the photos there got to the private directory where it doesn’t show on my android gallery. I don’t know what happened but there is no official solution to get the photos back. So I thought why not do it myself.

What I already did

I rooted m phone (temporarily) to get access to the msgstore.db file so that I can change the paths of the media. I can do that easily with a sqlite query.

What I couldn’t do

When I try to modify the actual database, it says that I cannot do it since the file got corrupted. I think there might be a checksum or something somewhere but I can’t seem to find any information about it. Does anyone know how I can do this without tripping the integrity checker?

  • spookedbyroachesOPEnglish
    12·
    7 months ago

    I can but then the photos are gonna be duplicates which would take up a lot of space

      • spookedbyroachesOPEnglish
        2·
        7 months ago

        That would have been a genius idea actually it would solve all of my problems. However, it seems like Android doesn’t allow hard or soft links through SELinux. I tried doing it in termux in root mode but it told me “Function not implemented.”

          • spookedbyroachesOPEnglish
            2·
            7 months ago

            I tried it on termux and it says “permission denied”, and I have access to write on both folders on termux

              • spookedbyroachesOPEnglish
                2·
                7 months ago

                I think it’s Android itself. I can only do symlinks in the /data partition not /storage/emulated according to this. And I tried it and it seems to be true.

                ` ~ $ pwd

                /data/data/com.termux/files/home

                ~ $ touch ok

                ~ $ ln ok ok.ok

                ln: failed to create hard link ‘ok.ok’ => ‘ok’: Permission denied

                ~ $ ln ok -s ok.ok

                ~ $ ls

                ok ok.ok

                ~ $ cd /storage/emulated/0

                …/emulated/0 $ touch ok

                …/emulated/0 $ ln ok -s ok.ok

                ln: failed to create symbolic link ‘ok.ok’: Permission denied

                `