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Partition Gap – One physical hard disk drive can be partitioned to contain one or more logical drives when computer users utilize programs such as FDisk or Partition Magic. On large hard disk drives it is not uncommon to have multiple partitions that can be used to store data in different logical drives, like drives C or D. When multiple partitions are involved it is possible for gaps to exist between the partitions, which are referred to as partition gaps since they can be used for covert data storage. Partition gaps can contain legacy data in sectors that were previously associated with data files stored on prior partitions, which can occur when physical hard disk drives are repartitioned during the upgrade of a computer. For these reasons, partition gaps can be a source of computer security risks and data hiding.
PC – Personal computer.
PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) – A handheld device that provides any of the following features: computing, telephone, fax, Internet or networking.
PDF (Portable Document Format) – A proprietary format of Adobe Corporation, it has become a de facto standard for transmitting documents that the sender does not want to be altered and for transmitting documents to commercial printers and to the Web for online publishing.
Petabyte – A measure of computer data storage. One petabyte is equivalent to one thousand million million bytes.
Plaintext – The text used most often for electronic documents as it is the least formatted and most portable.
Pointer – Identifies the space on a disk that contains the location of an electronic document or data and prevents that location from being overwritten.
Private Network – A private network is one that, although it is isolated from the Internet, is still connected to the Internet.
PST – A PST file is the file in which Microsoft Outlook stores its data and is created when an email account is created. In addition, PST files may also be created to backup and archive Outlook folders, email messages, forms and files.
Public Network – A public network is a network that is part of the public Internet.
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