No, you're quite right. Network backups are not nearly as robust as direct to drive backups. That's why I recommend them as secondary backups, not primary ones.
You also cannot properly preserve all the data you need to on an AFP/SMB device. So you'll end up with a "lossy" backup. You don't want that either.
As I said, iSCSI volumes act as truly native volumes. You can back up directly to them, over a network, with no loss. I do this all the time. But network connections are inherently less reliable than "physical" connection to a drive, regardless of their convenience.
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--Dave Nanian
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