Upgrade of old gitlab fails, need advice

Hello all,
I inherited and old server and am trying to upgrade an old gitlab CE to current. The running version I have is on CentOS 6.6, and reports the following:
GitLab 7.7.0
GitLab Shell 2.4.1
GitLab API v3
Ruby 2.1.4p265
Rails 4.1.1

This is a default install which the system reports as:
gitlab.x86_64 7.7.0_omnibus.5.4.0.ci-1.el6

I was somewhat successful in updating this to:
gitlab-ce.x86_64 10.8.4-ce.0.el6

However on start postgresql does not come up. I ultimately traced this down to a config & data incompatibility between postgresql v9.2 and v9.6.

So I am looking to see what my options are. Looks like this is a big version difference and likely what I’m trying to do in one step is not reasonable.

Should I look to attempt a step wise upgrade from that old version up to current? Or would it be suggested to create a brand new gitlab instance, and somehow import the DB & git repos?

Thankfully I’m doing this all on VM’s, so this is all just testing prior to a real upgrade.

Any advice appreciated, thanks