He had to use the "manual extraction" method—the only way, according to an old, obscure thread he found on Reddit. He hooked up the phone, using adb commands to manually pull the /data/data/com.whatsapp directory, hoping the sandbox data hadn't been fully purged.
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: You must have the key file located in /data/data/com.whatsapp/files/key . He had to use the "manual extraction" method—the