[dnanian]

Sorry, that's not in the plan. Network copies to your NAS won't work, because there's no way to provide a full-fidelity backup, with all ownership and everything else intact in native format.

Using a sparse image allows us to authorize against it (and thus copy files that are owned by a user other than the one logged in), keep HFS+ as the file system, and preserve everything -- metadata, EAs, ACLs, the whole thing -- in a directly accessible Finder format that can roundtrip with no stripping of info.

The fact that there's a speed penalty for doing it that way -- something that will no doubt improve as Apple improves the way the OS manages both network traffic and its own file I/O -- is secondary compared to the above... and since Smart Update is far faster once the main copy is done, and you're typically scheduling a backup to be done when the machine is idle, I don't think that focusing on this is a priority right now.

Hope that explains my position on this...