Dealing with Inherited Data and Code?

bhima asks: "Recently I have inherited an embedded project which developed and maintained by a recently acquired company. The 'technology transfer' consisted of me traveling to their facility for two weeks of special high intensity training and returning with a couple of hard drive, equivalent DVD-ROMS, 200 kilograms of paper and a stack of tape backups. These contain a lot of interesting and important data but it is in every conceivable format: hundreds of megabytes of Outlook PST files, Adobe PageMaker & Illustrator (4 different versions for Mac & PC), Gerber files, Microsoft Office files (every version ever), Visio Files, Tiffs, Jpegs, AutoDesk Files, Pro-E files. To top it all off they used no concurrent versioning system for their firmware so I have hundreds of tar.gz files that are snapshots of code, plus the resultant binary record for version represented by the tar file. We have a student translating all of the CAD data to our system, but that's only part of the story. Is there an easy way to get the firmware in to CVS or subversion? What's the best way to organize all of this data so that it's actually usable?"