Hey, thanks. I have, while waiting for a reply, continued looking through the forum and found a solution that worked. I did edit the settings.php adding the line " $settings[‘file_private_path’] = ‘/opt/drupal/web/sites/default/private/files’; " but removing the preceding slash from in front of opt/. Also a hard server reboot did nothing I had to clear the cache in admin - config - development - performance. I have only uploaded one pdf thus far but it seems to be working. Thanks again for the fast reply
I followed this post for the most part: