Hello! I realize this may not be the best place, but after reading multiple discussions, I figured that this may be the place where I can at least get some level of certainty around if I can ever restore my messages or not. The following is from my post on r/whatsapp, but still holds good. I'd thoroughly appreciate any insight or help of any kind. Thank you in advance!

I've been using WhatsApp for over 10 years and outside of a few times over 8 years ago, I've always safely been able to transfer chats across phones and SIMs and it's worked like a charm every single time. Except this time.

Some context: I was on the beta version, which last week, when updated, began crashing whenever I'd open the app, making is unusable. After waiting for more than a day for a fix to arrive, I decided to leave the beta, uninstall WhatsApp and reinstall it. I think this is where I screwed up, but I can't be too sure. Here's what happened next.

1. When I reinstalled it, rather than directly get the backup from Google Drive and restore from there, it first asked for my encryption password (or the 64-bit key, if I had that instead). I found this odd, because I had not set up E2E encryption to begin with, and so didn't know how to proceed, and so exit the process. I tried a few passwords, which didn't work before exiting though.
2. Did some reading up and saw that the only way to reset the password would be to set a new one. So I uninstalled, reinstalled, skipped the restore and then set a new password.
3. Armed with a new password, I then uninstalled, reinstalled and used this new password, at which point, it went about restoring the backup from Google Drive. A few minutes later, I got an error - "Sorry, we were unable to restore any of your message history backups." and it hadn't restored any of my messages (over 8 years worth) and instead began restoring my media (which I don't really care much about).

I have the db.crypt15 files - one big 110 MB one and a few incremental files (which I'd ideally merge into one, but I'd be just as happy with the largest file to begin with), but WhatsApp refuses to restore any of the messages from them.

One of the suggestions was to, after the initial set up screen, put the phone in Airplane Mode and force it to restore from the local, but when I do, after putting the new password (and it validates it too) I get the same error message as in step 3.

I'm almost ready to give up and use this as a fresh start to trim my messages and contacts, but at the same time, I want to try everything I can to get this back.

Does anyone know how I can do this? Again, I do NOT have the 64-bit key and only the password. If there's a way to restore the backup, and setup a new key which can then also be applied to previously created files, AND then that can be used again to restore from there, please let me know. Thank you!

Extras:

1. I reached out to WhatsApp support and they said there is a bug with backups that they are investigating.
2. When I let the restoration to go through without the chats, since it downloads the chats, I can see a new msgstore.db.crypt file being created. Is this something that's possible - I let it do it's thing without restoring the chats, reset the password and use the 64-bit key this time, uninstall and reinstall WhatsApp (again), point it to this newly created msgstore.db.crypt file, and use the 64-bit key to successfully restore the chats?

In my head, it makes sense, but nothing I've tried over the last week that logically makes sense actually works. Please help. Thank you!

Even more extras:

I just used wainfo on the large 110 MB file and got this output -

wainfo.py:50 : [W] This script is in beta stage.
keyfactory.py:31 : [D] Reading keyfile...
keyfactory.py:43 : [C] The keyfile is not a valid Java object: Invalid file magic: 0x8501
keyfactory.py:55 : [C] Unrecognized key file format.
None

Did I screw things up when I left the beta and installed the non-beta version of WhatsApp? :(