Pain in converting Portfolio 4 files to Portfolio 7 format

I wasn't aware of the pain involving converting Portfolio 4 files to Portfolio 7 format until recently. I started yanking out the stuffs I stored in storage for years (about 6 years) and found that I had a lot of photo disc cataloged by Portfolio 4 format. So I thought, "Probably just open it using Portfolio 7". Well it failed, as the application only able to open it in read only format.

Frustrated I was, I checked around and found the following two articles in the Extensis web site:
- How can I upgrade my Portfolio 6 or earlier catalog to Portfolio 7?
- I'm having trouble upgrading my Portfolio 6 catalog to Portfolio 7

It's great that they document this specific information on the site, but it also means that the problem happens so frequently that they have to put a specific section for it.

So now I am in the process of so called "recovery" in Portfolio 6, hoping that once it's done, I can open it with Portfolio 7 or even Portfolio 8. Here's some tidbit about the process:

- Needs a lot of disc space. At least 2 to 3 gigabyte should be available in order to conduct a successful recovery.
- it seems like the longest time spend was in Rebuilding Schema and Tables. In fact, it seems to take more than hours to complete the process. At least I am currently still waiting for it to complete.