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It’s healthy for your data when you prevent someone else accessing your data!  Actually, it’s healthy for you!  Sensitive information should be locked in a safe with biometric reading capabilities and sophisticated locks with special keys, but we’re talking about information that need to be access daily and sometimes even sharing such data over a secure network (unsecured network is a not a go); it will be a super hassle for you to use dozen of special keys to unlock the safe and then have your eyes and fingerprints to be checked out by a system, and who would have such capabilities or such technology?  Only the elites and the government we presumed!  Average Joe like us don’t have to go that far and don’t have such capabilities.  Fortunately, on a good operating system such as Mac OS X, we can encrypted our data so unwanted strangers and bodies will not have access to our sensitive data.  The question is how?  Read more to find out.

How do you encrypted a disk image on Mac?

1. Open Disk Utility from Applications > Utilities.
2. Choose File > New > Blank Disk Image.
3. Enter a name for image, and then choose where to store it.
4. In the name field, enter the name you want to see as the image is mounted.
5. Choose the size of the image from the Size-pop-up menu.
6. Choose a format from a Format-pop-up menu.
7. Choose an encryption method from Encryption-pop-up menu.  Choose AES-256 for a better encryption, but the process will take longer.
8. Choose a partition type from the Partition-pop-up menu.
9. Choose a format from the Image-format-pop-up menu.
10. Click create.
11. Enter a password and verify it for future access to the encrypted disk image.
12. Deselect the “Remember password (Add to Keychain)” and click OK.

You can also create an encrypted disk image for existing data such as USB flash drive and others.

1. Open Disk Utility from Applications > Utilities.
2. Choose File > New > Disk Image from Folder.
3. Select a folder and click Image.
4. Enter the name for image and choose where to store it.
5. Choose image format from the Format-pop-up menu.
6. Choose encryption method.  Choose AES-256 for a better encryption but the process will take longer.
7. Click save.
8. Enter password and verify it for future access to the encrypted disk image.

Make sure you delete the original sensitive unencrypted folder that you encrypted for.  Why?  Mac won’t actually encrypting the existing data, but it rather creates the copies of an existing data and then encrypting the copies, therefore only the newly encrypting duplicate copies of data can be secured, but the original data are not encrypted and not secure.  Source.