Part of #378; copied from https://github.com/backdrop/backdrop-issues/issues/2887#issuecomment-405...
I was playing around with D8 core and contrib media-related modules, and this specific feature drew my attention:

...so, media types have this "Field mapping" feature (the screenshot above is for the "Image" media type), which allows you to store metadata information to entity fields. I know we are a long way from anything like that (or are we?), and I don't wanna derail this issue here, but I thought that we could perhaps be using this to be automatically storing EXIF data to such a field (that we could be hiding by default). This could help us retain the EXIF data across any edit operations I believe.
Just a thought.
Recent comments
Hi ian, so, in your case all the other admin pages work fine, including the status page, only admin/reports/updates fails? But you can access admin/reports? Weird... I...
Update Report thows "Access denied You are not authorized to access this page."
The File (Field) Paths module should be able to move existing files. I've not tested it, but the module description says: Retroactive updates - rename and/or move...
Moving from /files into subdirectories
Yes indeed. We are exploring a few other more costly options, but as we are a low-resource start-up, we could save a lot of money by integrating Backdrop, CiviCRM and Ubercart for our membership...
UberPOS for Backdrop?