That data structure is the PHP Serialize format, you can use it as is, or decode/encode it using unserialize() and serialize(). as long as your destination field is the same type then the data is just an array of two items, “value” and “label”.
This is how ACF packs multiple pieces of information into a single db cell when it makes sense for some field types, the equivalent would be JSON encoding.
I’d like to make a suggestion for the developers and that is under the context of a network enable multi site installation, that the “acf_version” tracking option is moved to the new “wp_blogmeta” table when available, meaning it could be queried as a single statement for all sites.
https://make.wordpress.org/core/2019/01/28/multisite-support-for-site-metadata-in-5-1/
Does this make sense?
