Photo scanning is considered my hobby. I have been around photography since my early teens and only went totally digital in 2007. About the same time I started the slow and often tedious process of one at a time scanning/filing/maintaining backups and now have a library approaching 130,000 images. I have a thousands more to go, and I am laughed at as a "digital hoarder"- until I retrieve something like a measles immunization from when my grown children were 6 in 10 minutes flat!
Did you pay too much? Not if the throughput, including labeling and putting into retrievable files is better than 2 per minute which is sort of what my flatbed scanner on a $60 HP printer does on average.
"Best practices" include a a "save as" name that uses year/month in the name. After tweeking my naming system, I settled on Year_Month description # in series. So I saved 8 pictures earlier today from my daughters Facebook page of my grandsons 11 month birthday and labeled them "2018_9 Joey turns 11 months (1)", and put that into my "2018 Events" file folder. Sometimes I have to guess the date and months, but over time I felt I was building a big puzzle and other photos helped me improve my dates.
I have file folders for every year since I god married, folders for "Pre- wife", "Pre Husband" for hers, "Pets through the years, Landscape/garden pictures, Easter, Halloween and Christmas seasons, Professional photos, and one called "On Holiday" where I have separated the photos of all the major trips I have made.