Best Design for Home Network Between PC and Mac

Good day, all!
Forgive me if this has been covered before - I could not find a thread addressing this very issue.
I have an iMac, and my wife refuses to give up her PC.  She is also not that great at routinely backing up her PC laptop, leaving it to me to do it periodically.  To address this, I purchased an Airport Extreme and hooked up an external hard drive, hoping that she would use it (she doesn't).  I partitioned the hard drive such that half is formatted for TimeMachine (I periodically hook up my iMac physically to the hard drive to perform back ups) and the other half is formatted such that both the PC and Mac can access it, though neither can automatically back up to it.
(If you've made it this far: thank you, thank you, thank you.)
I would like to set up the network in a more efficient manner.  I realize that doing so will likely preclude me from taking advantage of the TimeMachine function, but I would like to design this home network such that my wife's computer will automatically back up to the hard drive (she has tons of pictures and does not routintely back them up) and allow all computers to easily access and "sync" with the external hard drive.  In other words, I would like to create a way in which the local hard drive of each computer (or a folder within) mirrors the contents of the network (Airport Extreme) hard drive.
I understand that Dropbox sort of does this by having a folder on each machine that syncs with each other and with an off-site server, but I prefer to keep it local (and not pay a monthly fee).
Is this possible?  Or should I simply maintain separate hard drives for each computer?
I appreciate any and all help.
James

Ok, first be aware that Apple does NOT support Time Machine backups to an AirPort Disk (an external USB HDD connected to an 802.11n AirPort Extreme Base Station (AEBSn)). These may appear to work for a while, but it's only a matter of time before them become corrupted ... and I highly recommend that if your data is critical to stop using this method.
At best, the AirPort Disk can be used for file storage. It may also be possible to use it with a Windows-based backup solution, but not Time Machine. One example product for Windows is Genie9's Genie Timeline Home which is similar to Time Machine in operation.
With that said, the best backup performance (for either OS) would be to either use a dedicated external HDD attached to each device or to use a dedicated NAS device ... preferably connected by Ethernet. Some NAS devices also provide Time Machine support. One of them is the Drobo FS.

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