Doing a fresh install of vB while preserving data and SOME addon tables / columns
 

Hi,

I've run a board of several thousand users and a few hundred thousand posts for the past 4 to 5 years and have decided to do a complete overhaul and tidy things up.

I've installed and removed a lot of mods (manually installed ones before the days of add-ons) in the past which have added tables and columns throughout the DB. This has resulted in a rather cluttered DB with a lot of useless data. I'm not aware of any actual performance impact, but I would nevertheless like to clean things up a little.

What I would like to do is this:

1. Do a fresh new install of the latest vB version. I will retain a very small selection of addons from the old board. Many of these addons have their own tables in the DB, and some have added columns to the user table.

2. Import all the crucial vB data from the old database (note: this excludes all non-vB tables and alterations such as additional user table columns added by old mods).

3. Selectively import tables and columns (specifically columns from the user table which store mod-specific data) which will allow me to continue selected addons on the fresh forum.

Is there any automated script which can do this for me? I would love to be able to avoid having to fiddle around with manual SQL queries in phpmyadmin.

Has anyone else here ever had the urge to do a big Spring clean like this? How did you go?

Thanks!