Having trouble getting a download to show up

Hi,

Trying to use this plugin to serve up some datasets, and I followed along with the video tutorial to create a download, with the single exception of instead of uploading the file I instead pointed it to the file that was to be downloaded.

For this process I created a directory called downloads in the base installation path of the wordpress directory (eg. /var/www/html/downloads) and then created a symbolic link to where the data lived on one of our networked drives since the datasets are in excess of a few GB’s with the total amount of data for what we want to host at over 50 TB’s we can’t upload the data directly to the wordpress server.

However after creating the download page we get a 404 error and
The requested URL /downloads/climate-2014-02/ was not found on this server.

Is this an error in not setting up plugin properly and if so could you point to a clearer documentation on how to add downloads?

Thanks

https://wordpress.org/plugins/easy-digital-downloads/