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I have 5 laptops and 1 desktop unit in the house. I need to do backups of MSOffice documents, MP3, picture and video files. Is it possible to use a single external hard drive and partition it into 6 sections and use each section as the backup location of each computer?

This would not be on a network, but would be hooked up to each via USB, backup, then move on to the next. Said external hard drive to then be stored offsite.

Ideas?

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Are they all in different locations? If not, do you connect to the Internet with them? Instead of using a USB hard drive which has multiple points of failure I.e. USB controller, internal hd interface and finally the drive itself.  How much data are we talking about? Why not use a online back up utility like mozey, amazon or jungle disk?

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i'm gonna say the opposite and suggest getting 2 usb whaters, because what if the internet goes away.. or more to the point the guy on the other side of the internet?
 

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Good point! Maybe it's time to go whole hog and set up a home server with a RAID setup.