Data shoehorning

Whenever I burn a data disk compilation I am either left with a lot of wasted space, or I find that there isn't enough room to accommodate my files. Any practical suggestions would be appreciated.

Well you could go back to school and brush up on your math technique... or you could let Tim Russell's Fill CD do the calculations for you. What this program does is work out the best way in which to arrange any given selection of files to make optimal use of the available space on a CD-R. The 'best fit files' can then be moved to another folder to remove them from the candidate list before being written to a CD-R.