Pretty ordinary situation- just farmer with a wife that works at local hospital. We do have a printer/scanner combo but I would rather not have all those documents only stored on our computer in case of a hard drive crash (which has happened before). Id like to have a couple different modes of backup. I am not a real big fan of external hard drives as I am not super tech savvy to use these efficiently- we have one to back up pictures and such since the crash and when I go to look and see if the information is on the external drive I find it very confusing to find exactly what I am looking for.
Generally, you want one local backup (like an external hard drive) and one cloud backup in addition to the storage on your computer. Regardless of what scanner you use, if you have anything important saved on your computer it is critical you back it up in some way.
An external hard drive is easy enough to use. Every couple of weeks, just connect it to your computer, then copy/paste all the files on your computer back into the external hard drive. So then whatever file system you have on your computer is duplicated on the external hard drive.
For the cloud, just find an online backup service like Carbonite, Backblaze, iDrive, etc. There is cost involved (usually around $60/year) but they have big capacities so you can store documents, photos, video, etc. They're usually pretty intuitive to use, and just like the external hard drive, whatever file system is on your computer should carry through to your online backup service.
It's definitely worth spending some time to think through a file system so it's easy to locate later. Just a few folders (and sub-folders) can go a long way.