[Zope] zope migration (plone related)

[chris h]

Greets:

Ive been handed an interesting challenge. A debian woody install inclusive of 
zope and plone died an unruley death due to hardware failure. All that 
remains is a backup of the data.fs

Now its easy enough to reinstall woody and get everything up and running. 
However when I looked at the installed version of zope, python, cmf and plone 
(this is essentially a plone site for a dot org) they are extremely dated but 
at least are consistant with the version of zope which 2.5.1 

Given that this collection is so old, Im wondering how difficult of a task it 
is to move this collection to more recent version of the same. From by basic 
and preliminary reading it does not look good as everything must be done 
incrementally to move the collection to the latest release of plone and 
associated dependencies. 

So I started thinking about the ZODB. Once restarted on a fresh woody install, 
and zope 2.5.1 there must be a way to extract only the user data from the 
ZODB or from plone itself (the later being very easy to do) Secondly once I 
have the user data there must be a simpler way to migrate this data to a more 
current release of zope/plone then in incremental stages as described in a 
few docs that I read. 

I dont mind doing the necessary homework but I was wondering if my 
understanding of the process is correct, am I missing something or are there 
short cuts that I have not reviewed or considered. 

Thanks for any references or advise sent this way.

Best regards

/ch