Missing Database

I have a serious issue with my site and my webhost is pretty much useless.

Background: At one time I had a non-WP main site and a WP-based blog. The main site address was rf-photography.ca and the blog was rf-photography.ca/blog. I decided to consolidate everything under WP then setup a redirect so that people going to rf-photography.ca got to the main homepage. All the pages/posts/media was under the /blog admin. Last week I attempted to do an update to the Softaculous scripts. The update worked fine for the rf-photography.ca domain (or so I thought), but failed for the /blog domain. In doing the update, it appears the link between the main site and the /blog site has been broken. If you to to the main site URL, a WP setup screen appears. If you go to the /blog URL, the main blog page appears but trying to click on any links goes back to the WP setup screen. I am able to log into my cPanel. I am also able to log into my /blog WP Dashboard. In the dashboard, I can see all of the data that is on the site – pages, posts, photos, videos, etc.

Status: My webhost told me I would need to do a complete backup of the database, create a new database under the main rf-photography.ca domain, copy all the data from the old database into the new and set up a new master user under the new database. From that point forward, all the site admin would be done under the main domain rather than the /blog domain.

Trying to work with my webhost on the phone this morning, neither of us could find the .sql database in the cPanel File Manager. If I look at the wp-config file, it tells me the name of the database. If I look at the Databases section of my cPanel, the database is listed there. If I go into phpMyAdmin, I can drill down in the database and see all my posts. I can’t see my media assets, but perhaps those are stored somewhere else.

I may be in a position where I have to rebuild everything from scratch. I can copy/paste information from blog posts and pages. But not sure what to do about media.

Questions: Is cPanel>File Manager the right place to look for my .sql database? If not, where would it be?

Since I can’t see a section of the database that contains media assets in phpMyAdmin, are those stored somewhere else? If so, where might I find them?

Is there possibly an easier way to recreate my site than manually copying/pasting everything if I can’t find the database?

I have many hundreds of media assets on the site (112 pages according to what I see on my Dashboard), yet the database is only listed at about 95MB. This seems to indicate that the media assets are not in the main database or that the database is very highly compressed. Is either true?

Thank you in advance.