Is it possible to import a project without export file?

Hello,
Even I ran into this question, it doesn’t actually answer neither previous question nor mine.

Since one of my company’s IP suspended, the self hosted gitlab repo on these addresses can not be reached further more. I have their clones but not any export files so my question whether it’s possible to import them on another self hosted gitlab account or not.

I tried but couldn’t find a way to do it from “importing project” options without export file. And the help link attached not commenting anything about how to import projects without export file.

It’s quite likely to understand from the documentation that if you don’t have an export file, you can’t import any projects, but even you create a repo from scratch and commits/deploys it, it works fine with all the branches and tags.