Cannot upgrade TYPO3 from 4.5 to 6.2

Question

A TYPO3 4.4.15 site has been disabled by the remote host's upgrade of PHP to version 5.6.23. Reading the TYPO3 upgrade docs suggests the upgrade path of the TYPO3 installation to something compatible with 5.6 is: 4.4.15 -> 4.6.n -> 4.7.n -> 6.0.n -> 6.1.n -> 6.2.n -> 7 LTS

This is likely the safest path. Is there an equally safe but shorter path? [All work will be done in a VM sandbox.]

Edit 1

Made it through 4.5.40. All update steps pass, all database mods accomplished. Tarball of 4.5 created, mysqldump created. Both copied to VM with PHP 5.6. Tarball extracted, database recreated with dump. Launching site with typo3_src -> ../typo3_src-6.2.30, database mod fails with:

Database update failed
Error: Data truncated for column 'adminusers' at row 1

Edit #2

Changed title from Shortest safe path from TYPO3 4.4.15 to 7 LTS to Cannot upgrade TYPO3 from 4.5 to 6.2.

Above occurs even after adding smooth_migration. Hate to see what a bumpy migration is!

Edit #3:

Got past the adminusers error by truncating sys_workspace. Upgrades performed through the install tool. Now chasing bugs with a supposedly upgraded site. It's astounding how stuff noted years ago persists.

Edit #4:

Errors received after upgrade all see to relate to references to requiring PATH_t3lib... items. Each error that appeared in /var/log/apache2/error.log was addressed as front & back end screens were refreshed until no further errors occurred.

Edit #5:

Once error-free, the site is missing both left & right columns of a three column setup. I do not know how to recreate them and am largely disinclined to go back to figure out how and where the got lost. But I'm open to hints on finding them, not recreating them. I'll upvote the answer below but not accept because I don't think I've fully upgraded the site.

Edit #6:

In going back over the process I learned that elements had actually disappeared on the conversion from 4.4 to 4.5. What's curious, but beyond my concern for now at least, is that the "missing" elements appear in the backend. They just are not displayed on the page where they appeared in 4.4.