Firstly, you can either use an external USB drive which are relatively low-cost, and then share the external drive over the network - this is not ideal for several reason plus you can only use the external drive when the PC it is connected to is actually switched on - but it is cheap and it does work.
Then you could go for NAS device, which is more expensive but connects directly to the network so always accessible and not dependant on any specific PC being switched-on. Some NAS devices are wired-only while others have WiFi.
If you have Windows XP, you can use Norton Ghost or PowerQuest Drive Image to ghost the hard disk to the NAS device. Drive Image works better than Norton in my opinion, and runs as a Windows application in the background. The back-up images are compressed, and like Norton you can browse the back-up image file and extratct single files from it if needed.
Sadly Symantec, who own Norton for some time now, recently took-over PowerQuest so no new version of DriveImage are available - the last one was 2003 (the technology is supposed to have been integrated into the latest versions of Norton Ghost).
Drive Image does not support Vista and I couldn't get Norton Ghost to work with it either (though some people in support forums say they did manage it).
I now use at home either the built-in ms-backup application which works well though does not offer compression, or this very neat utility which costs $50 USD:
http://www.drive-image.com , both allow me to image the Vista PCs to shared storage.