How to export archived incidents programmatically?

Content

Hi,

there are 3 million archived incidents in the site and we need only some of them. Some could be purged, some not. But the purge setting will delete all of them.

What we would need is a selective purging of archived incidents. This seems not possible. Any ideas would be very welcome.

However, we could export those incidents and keep them elsewhere and purge them earlier from Service Cloud. But how is it possible to export 3 million archived incidents programmatically?

The UI allows to export 100 archived incidents at a time and the archived incidents are stored as XML files on the server. But is there a way to do it programmatically through an API? The archived_incidents table contains some data, but not the thread. Are these XML files accessible anywhere?