When you load a wallet, you should see a database folder, but when you close it, it disappears. If you don't see it, then im assuming this behaviour happens with dbd (berkeley) wallets and not sqlite wallets (more modern ones) which never need that database file.
Yeah, I figured, thanks for clarifying.
This whole discussion is about how it isn't.
Frankly, backing up a wallet by going to the filesystem is not recommended (or really supported) method of backup because of these kinds of issues. The only recommended way to backup a wallet is to use the backupwallet RPC or File > Backup Wallet in the GUI.
That's exactly how I'm doing it (using the GUI version). The output of this command (i.e what's actually saved) is a single
wallet.dat file. When I read your post above, talking about backing up the database directory, I felt like asking, just for clarity.