Unable to do multi-year reports or take a full ticket backup

Unable to do multi-year reports or take a full ticket backup

We simply need to export ALL the tickets on our Zoho Desk portal but are unable to.

It is a basic GDPR requirement (UK Data processing) and we need to be able to do this by LAW.
Another reason is that we sometimes need to see all tickets in one place and since ZOHO forced the dreaded archive feature on everyone, it has been a nightmare to work with this software. 
We would like to use Excel to build basic ticket reports.

There are tow ways this should be possible but it simply does not seem to be possible to o a usable data dump of all FULL tickets. I tried this: 

  1. Setup > Data Administration > Export
    1. I need to option for literally ALL tickets but when I select all tickets I only get about 30 tickets- it seems to be a random selection.
      All other options only give me a random selection of tickets. Also, it doesn’t export the full ticket but only the basic information
  2. When I take a Setup > Data Administration > Data Backup it then gives me 17 files with Thread_1 being the largest one. How do I import this in Excel to build a coherent view of all tickets?
Does anyone have any suggestions?