problem: windows 7 backup to a hard disk on a desktop

with my old laptop, i used to use acronis to backup my laptop on to a hard disk on my desktop (running windows xp) and had no problem. with my new(er) laptop with windows 7 (home premium) installed, i decided to try the windows backup software. however when i try to setup the backup, it doesn't detect any place to do the backup on except the dvd drive (i think i should be seeing an option to backup on a network drive). i can access my desktop hard drive from my laptop, and i can even write on it, but the windows 7 backup software doesn't think that the hard drive is there. i looked at the properties of the hard drive as seen from the laptop, and it says that the size of the drive is 0 bytes. in reality, the drive has got over 200 GB of free space. what am i doing wrong?

 

You can't backup to network locations unless you're running Windows 7 Pro and above; weird limitation but they don't expect home users to even be able to setup network backups in the first place (let alone do backups at all >_>).

 

thanks for the answer. i was afraid of that. looks like i'm going to have to go back to acronis then.