I'm going to depart from the usual format today for a personal story. It's sentimental, but there are a few lessons about technology in it, so stick with me.

Last week, we lost one of our two greyhounds. Rune came to us 2 1/2 years ago from a racetrack in Wichita, Kan. that had just closed. He had run about 120 races and won 30 of them. He adopted Diane and me and our other greyhound, Poster, an ex-racer from Florida who joined us in 2005.

Rune was a majestic animal, with a joie de vivre we had never before seen in a dog - and we've had more than a few. He was a gift, pure and simple. I know dog lovers will understand it when I say that not a day went by when he didn't melt our hearts.

Anyway, Rune's teeth were worn down from trying to gnaw through the bars on the cages they kept him in at the track. Before he came to us via the adoption organization, a vet had cleaned and sealed his teeth, but after more than two years of eating kibble and chewing on stuffed animals, it was time to do it again. At the veterinary clinic, they put him under and discovered he had abscesses, so several teeth had to be pulled. Everything went fine, but during recovery his heart stopped, and they couldn't bring him back.

I couldn't bear also losing the memory of our Best Big Boy, so I started looking for photographs of him, only to discover that there didn't seem to be many. I eventually found about a dozen printed photos that I think convey Rune's essence, so that we can tell people his story in words and pictures. But few of the digital photos I took of him had survived. They had been saved on a couple of computers I no longer have. And though I always make it a point to back up important documents, I hadn't bothered with photos. I figured I had enough good prints on hand and would have the opportunity to take many more photos of Rune in the years ahead. Pretty stupid, eh?

So now the challenge became how to preserve the printed photos I did have. And this is where technology proved a blessing. My all-in-one printer has a flatbed scanner that I used to redigitize the photos.

Lesson in scanning

The all-in-one can scan at 1,200 dots per inch, and I figured, why not use the highest resolution to get the best results? It turns out it doesn't work that way. Scanning at high resolutions is great for negatives and slides because those are meant to be greatly enlarged for printing. But when you already have a 5-by-7 or 8-by-10 print (which you don't plan to enlarge further), a much lower resolution works just as well. Most experts think that you don't get any benefit from scanning a color photo at more than 300 dpi. The only thing you get by using a higher resolution is a photo file that takes up a ton of space.

Any good all-in-one printer can produce photo scans that are very close in quality to the printed originals. The color and contrast may need a bit of tweaking, but you can do that with any image-editing program. Just make sure to set the all-in-one so it saves scans in jpeg format, which makes it easy to edit. Also, before making a print of the scanned image, be sure to use your software's "sharpen" feature to crisp it up.

My Pictures

In the lessons-learned department, I now realize that dumping digital photos anywhere on a computer - in a folder on the desktop, for example - is a bad idea. They need to be all in one place, preferably in Windows' My Pictures. And you need to back up your photo folders every time you back up your documents and e-mail.

I have now backed up all my photos of Rune - and Poster - to a flash drive, and I intend to fill it up with more pictures of Poster and of our next hound (although it will be awhile before we're ready to adopt again). I also have included My Pictures in my automatic backups to IDrive (idrive.com), an online backup service I use. I'd recommend either that or Mozy (mozy.com). They cost about $50 a year, and they're worth every penny.

Photos can't bring Rune back to us. But every time I see them, he'll melt my heart all over again.

Got a question about computing? E-mail David Einstein at einstein.dave@gmail.com.

This article appeared on page D - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle