Moving statuses within a Workflow to a different status group

We have decided that a few of our statuses (which are already assigned to a large number of tasks) are miscategorized under "Active" and we'd like to move them to "Deferred".  I thought it was simply a drag and drag operation to do so, but see you actually have to create the status anew under the other status group.  QUESTION: I'm concerned about the impact to existing tasks with existing statuses assigned if we take "Backlog" for example, and re-create it under "Deferred".  Will this remove that Backlog status assignment from every task it's currently assigned to and then we'd need to go through and re-assign those once we'd created Backlog under "Deferred"?  I don't want to take any action here until I understand the impacts . Thank you!