Finding and exporting your Zendesk data

What it holds

Zendesk tickets connect customer requests with replies, internal notes and resolution status. Ticket fields and attachment references supply additional context around each support exchange.

Where Zendesk shows the size

1. In Explore, choose New report > Support > Support - Tickets > Start report.
2. Under Metrics, add Tickets > Tickets to display COUNT(Tickets), ensuring any date filter spans the entire account history.
3. Alternatively call GET /api/v2/tickets/count as an agent. Counts above 100,000 refresh on a 24-hour cycle and remain approximate.

Plan and admin role. Explore requires an Editor or Admin role and Professional, Enterprise or Enterprise Plus. Account exports require an admin and an eligible Suite or Support plan; Team plans are excluded. If exports are disabled, the account owner must ask support to activate them.

Exporting the full history

1. Open Admin Center > Account > Tools > Reports > Export as an admin.
2. Choose the full date range and JSON ticket export, delivered as NDJSON; this is preferable for large accounts.
3. Wait for the emailed link and download promptly. Large jobs may need a day or longer; links remain available for at least three days.
4. Retrieve attachment files separately through authenticated API requests using the links in the export.

CSV omits ticket descriptions, comments, deleted tickets and some complex fields. XML is limited to 500 MB, about 200,000 tickets.

Tickets larger than 1 MB lose comments in the export and appear in a separate exception file. Above one million tickets, JSON exports are divided into 31-day periods. AI-agent tickets are not included.

Private attachment URLs can expire rapidly and require authentication on messaging accounts or accounts created after December 5, 2024.

Admins can alternatively use incremental exports, with up to 1,000 records per page and about ten requests per minute; ticket-event exports can carry complete comment data.

You don't need to run an export to talk to us, and there's no need to clean it first — removing personal data is part of our work.