In this talk I am going to share original ideas and novel techniques we developed to cut down upgrade and migration times. It all was triggered by the challenging task of upgrading a heavily customized Plone 4 intranet to Plone 5 and contextually installing Plone Intranet while minimizing the downtime. Solr was involved in the process. Given we had to deal with 300 GB of data, the out of the box Plone upgrade procedure and the migration from Archetypes to Dexterity was simply too slow to fit the given time constraints. We were forced to explore new migrations paths and strategies. The outcome was a set of original ideas and techniques that can be shared and applied as well to other Plone/Zope projects.