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Imaging, disk imaging, seems to be a bit underestimated. I am under the impression that hdiutil as available on OSX systems is quite powerful. There are even a couple of graphical front ends to the utility, starting from Apple's own Disk Utility, across the whole quality spectrum of free- and shareware. Sadly, none of those graphical utilities fully unleashes the power of disk images or keeps me as much informed and in control as I like to be.
I have struggled with this before and ended up writing my own little (two line) shell script to make an internet-enabled, compressed, size-optimised disk image for distributing Rechnungs Checker. This time around I wanted a little more: I want to keep a backup copy of my documents folder on my iPod. I want this folder to be encrypted – just in case – and be writable and able to grow with the number of my documents. I couldn't get any of the graphical tools to do this – yet digging a bit into the manpage of hdiutil revealed a rather easy solution for this: hdiutil create -size 1g -type SPARSE -encryption CEncryptedEncoding -fs HFS+ -autostretch -ov Doku. Feel free to use it for yourself. The -size option give the size at which the file system maxes out and you'll have to do some additional steps to increase the image's size once it is reached. Up to that limit, though, the disk image's file will only grow as you fill it with data.
Women discriminated when buying electronics. Not really a surprise, I suppose.