Did that once to move to a larger disk and another time to recover from a crash. It worked as advertised both times. It is my primary back-up method using 2 separate external HDDs. I keep one at the office and another at home to avoid having all my back-ups in a single location. This is with Windows XP Pro. I have found it easy to use. Your move over is actually pretty stress-free since you still have your old disk to go back to. When I upsized the HDD I did the backup to the external drive, put in the new drive, booted up with the CD I created with Actonis and did the restore function. I think the old HDD is still sitting around the office somewhere...