Hmm, it can take a minute or two with a pretty big database, but it shouldn't be taking too much time.

Running just the sqlite3 .dump on mine (printing to terminal output instead of into a file) it takes ~1 minute for me. I have 13848 'events' in the database, mostly texts and chats, few call events (calls store a bit less data per event, since they don't have any associated text).

If your database is MASSIVE (either because of legitimate use or maybe some issue caused it to get spammed with entries), then it can take longer, it really depends on its size.

What's
output? Particularly of interest is the size. Mine is 5.0M (Megabytes).

[Edit]
Oh, and no, root isn't necessary. Well, it shouldn't be anyway if the file has permissions correctly set and you're not using any other unstandard stuff like SELinux (if we even have that available, I don't think we do) to limit perms more.
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