tjlst15, if I understand your problem, this might be helpful.
I recently had a similar problem with my home(SOHO) network and I was able to use a Maxtor external HDD. I booted up an older PC used as a server using a bootable CD-ROM with Acronis True Image 8 on it. I was then able to back up that machine to the external HDD.
The disk format used by external HDD might be a problem, so might want to repartition it to use ext3. I was using NTFS, but Acronis was able to write to an NTFS disk.
I was moving a fairly small amount of disk data(192 MEGs with compression), so a USB 1.1 port was good enough for the purpose, but in your sitch a faster USB 2.0 port might be helpful. (The Maxtor 80GB external HDD that I have supports USB 2.0, but is backward compatible with a USB 1.1 port.)
Does this help?