[dnanian]

Well, you can reach inside an image and pull files out, but since it's a volume like any other, it gets mounted and used. The *advantage* to an image is that it's just like any other volume, and restoration is easy. You have rather unique requirements here, which is why it seems to be a problem... but I truly don't understand the problem with "exposing" the files to the file system, because it can't really do any "harm"... what could possibly happen?