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Old tickets can technically be imported. The reason most organisations decide against it is worth understanding before you ask.
Why it is harder than it sounds
A ticket is not a message. It carries a requester, an assignee, a status, timestamps, a full comment thread with attachments, and fields that may not exist in Zendesk. Bringing it across means mapping every one of those to something in your new account, and inventing an answer wherever your old tool had a concept Zendesk does not.
The result is usually a set of tickets that look right in a list and read oddly when opened. Timestamps come through as import dates, agents who left appear as nobody, and the fields you cared about are empty.
What people actually need
When you ask why the history matters, the answer is almost always one of two things, and neither needs a full import.
- Looking something up occasionally. Keeping the old system readable, or exporting to a searchable archive, covers this at a fraction of the effort.
- Reporting on last year. Historical figures are better taken from the old system once and kept as a document. Mixed data across a migration produces reports nobody trusts anyway.
If you do need it
It is possible, through the API or a migration tool. Treat it as a project with its own budget rather than a step in the setup, and decide in advance which fields genuinely have to survive.
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