Another question came up today where the answer might be useful to others.

Scenario: You have only edit and admin-mode access to an existing EPiServer (4 or 5) installation and you need to programmatically extract the data from some of the pages in a quick and dirty way (uh-oh always be careful when you read those two requirements).

Of course there are tons of approaches to solving this - but if you don't have web service access or direct server access - and your CTRL+C, CTRL+V fingers are worn out another approach is simply to use the export function in admin mode and export the pages.

That will produce an .episerverdata file. "Ok, what now" you think and desperately try to open it in your favorite text-editor to figure out what kind of file it is. After doing that you'll realize that you unless you read binary well and is able to decompress in your head you're probably going to need another approach....

Solution: rename the file to .zip, open the archive and look at the nicely formatted xml files with serialized data.