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