Can you back up both Mac and PC on the same hard drive?

[BelfastBloke]

I am Mac, my wife is PC. (and yes, we do fit the advert's stereotypes)

I suspect, but don't know for sure, that the Mac Time Machine will back up to any hard drive that I buy. Does that mean PC's and Macs can back up to the same Hard drive.

I also suspect, but don't know for sure, that if I buy the Time Machine hard drive from the Apple Store, that my Mac backups will be automatic and easy. Can I back up DW's PC to that machine as well?

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Time machine can't just use any disk drive, the disk needs to be in a Mac friendly particular format. Mac OS Extended (journaled) format and with ACLs enabled to be precise. And that means that in turn a Windows machine is going to have a hard time playing nicely with it, you can get various bits of software that are meant to make such a drive work well with Windows, but I couldn't recommend one or comment on their reliability.

So what you might want to do is to partition the drive in two chunks. Have one partition formatted for the Mac and Time Machine and have the other in NTFS for Windows. Time Machine will want to try and use up all the space it is given anyway which is a very good reason to give it it's own partition to play with.

And then there's also the issue that OS X Lion introduced to do with compatibility with wireless NAS drives. If you're buying a NAS and not just a plug in drive then check very carefully that it is guaranteed to be compatible with Time Machine on Mac OS X Lion (and not just with Snow Leopard). There's a whole thread with more details on the NAS issue here:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/geeky_stuff/1376909-Which-NAS

Thanks for the summary and thanks also for the link. The two together should give me most of the guidelines I need to sort out what I need. I'm able to throw money at the problem, I think, so I should be able to get enough capacity, at least.

Having just realised that, maybe two smaller hard drives is the least complicated way to go?