I do remember seeing some limits around 2008 or so somewhere in the code but can't find the right timestamp right now.

Maybe @mattab remembers?

Can you otherwise maybe check in the database in the matomo_log_visit table and visit_last_action_time column if there are entries for before 2009?

AFAIK there shouldn't be a limit, except for data before when the first website came online - Tue, 06 Aug 1991 00:00:00 GMT.
see error triggered in

But this was 28 years ago

I just remembered this was fixed in Matomo 3.9. I saw this morning the limit in the tracker is set to 20 years so figured that can't be it. But just now randomly remembered we only increased it from 10 to 20 years a month ago. So if you update to the latest version and try again then it should work.

I do imported one month from 2008 year:

Logs import summary

341972 requests imported successfully
542 requests were downloads
2316284 requests ignored:
    23695 HTTP errors
    30083 HTTP redirects
    0 invalid log lines
    0 filtered log lines
    0 requests did not match any known site
    0 requests did not match any --hostname
    669 requests done by bots, search engines...
    2261837 requests to static resources (css, js, images, ico, ttf...)
    0 requests to file downloads did not match any --download-extensions

Website import summary

341972 requests imported to 1 sites
    1 sites already existed
    0 sites were created:

0 distinct hostnames did not match any existing site:

and run core:archive --force-all-websites --force-all-periods=315576000 --force-date-last-n=1000 --url='https://matomo.srce.hr/'

and

core:archive --url="https://matomo.srce.hr/" instead.
That do nothing...

MariaDB [matomo]> select visit_last_action_time from piwik_log_visit where visit_last_action_time like '2008%';
Empty set (36.10 sec)

this query does show no results.. i dont understand.

thank you.

See #14255 (comment) you need to update to the latest version.

thank you!