That's really what I'm aiming for. I like the idea of NAS because the alternative -- dedicated internal or external drive -- would require the PC it's attached to to be on when the other PCs are running their backups.
The more I think about it, the price differential between a traditional 1TB drive and a NAS 1TB drive is big enough that I'll probably just put up with the hassle of leaving the host PC switched on.
You can get a wireless data station for $99, and hook your USB disks into it. The terabyte network drive I got wasn’t much more than that, and it supports additional USB disks hanging off it — so did my 250gig network drive I already have, now that I think of it (it’s only 100mbits/sec ethernet).
User Data,...or complete Operating System plus Data...
With Multiple machines and if backup is your user Data,...then Network access across all machines is very nice...