Truncated exports

Before attempting to migrate to 2.7.1, I backed up the contents using the export function. It came out truncated. I tried it from another machine, that happened too, but further into the contents. I suspect it is a timeout somewhere (as I managed to use it on another, very small, WordPress blog I have).

I have seen a couple of closed threads here about this, but none resolved. Is it going to stay broken for ever? I need this here, as the standard migration does not fix correctly the change from latin1 to utf8, and all the contents come messed up.