Description of the bug I'm in a little over my head here. But, I'll report this and we'll see if it makes sense.
As I described in the forum I tried to create a menu link directly to a PDF in the file system, but I get an error message saying "The path '...' is either invalid or you do not have access to it."
I would expect to be able to create a menu link to a file uploaded to Backdrop.

In this issue @jenlampton said the following:
the menu system checks links to make sure they are registered system paths. We need to remove that validation too.
Which lead me to open this ticket and call it a bug (which might not be accurate).
Steps To Reproduce To reproduce the behavior: 1. Create a file field on a content type. 2. Add a file to a node and save 3. copy the relative path to the file in the file directory 4. Try to create a menu item linking to that file.
Recent comments
I am withdrawing my question for the following reason: https://forum.backdropcms.org/comment/8960#comment-8960
Error when trying to check for updates
My hosting is located in a country that blocks numerous online resources, so I am not surprised that updates and modules are unavailable. However, everything works perfectly on a local server...
Unable to run update - fails with Connection timed out
UPDATE: I fixed the errors that I found in the logs. They were related to deleting an old blog content type pulled over from Drupal that was still referenced in one of the layouts. I updated...
missing "add block" in custom layout