I've never heard you needed the chainstate files.
I did not say chainstate files.
The files in database/ are not for the chainstate, they are the BDB log files and used for
Write-ahead logging.
Im assuming there is a way to salvage the private keys from the wallet.dat without chainstate files otherwise I would be screwed.
There is no such guarantee. The log files will contain data that has not been written to the database file yet. Depending on when the wallet.dat was copied, the data may not yet exist in the database file and therefore losing the log files is catastrophic data loss.
Would actually be insane you need these files to backup your keys but I will try to find them anyway.
Would be insane to continue to use a database system that requires that.
Yeah I meant the database folder. Well the thing is, I managed to go into the old drive that had the full node, ages ago I was running a Windows node, and I kept updating that one. The last version I have saved is binaries for 0.16. There's a bunch of wallets from different years backed up. The last wallet file is from 2019. What I noticed is that there doesn't seem to be a database folder on the main folder, there is a database folder in the testnet folder but not on the main datadir folder. I don't remember deleting any folders so that's weird. I'll have to test those files, hopefully the most recent backups work.