backup maintenance plan fails with error 0x80131534 I recently set up a series of maintenance plans to backup all online databases. A full backup runs once a week, a differential runs once a day, and a transactional runs every ten minutes. We have two SQL Server instances on two machines. One works perfectly, backing up to another server on its network. The other, a Google cloud compute instance, is trying to back up to another Google compute instance, and it can't.

The SQL server in question, let's call it SQL1, is trying to back up to a Google server we'll call storage1. Storage1 is NOT a Google Storage bucket, just a full server with space to store the backups. Thus, standard Windows sharing should apply. I've made the SQLBackups folder on Storage1's hard drive fully shared to everyone on the network, so accessing it shouldn't be a problem. In fact, the plan can't be created unless the folder can be reached, so I know that's working. Yet, when I run the plan, it fails within ten seconds. The plan log isn't helpful, but the job log is more interesting: it reports that the job failed because it "could not load package. Error: 0X80131534. Description: no description available." Google has next to nothing on this error number.

The odd thing is, I ran into a similar problem while setting the same plans up on the other server, but it went away in the course of working out how to do all this so I never found out what exactly the problem was. I'm very confused, and in the meantime, our database isn't able to back up. Anything anyone can suggest is appreciated. Again, this is just the full backup job, and it's set to ignore offline databases and back up all databases. Thanks.
Grant the access to the computer account since the service is running under NT Service\InstanceName: domain_name>\$

Example: Domain1\MyServerName$

MyServerName must be the name of the server, not the name of the SQL instance. Get the server name via hostname in a cmd window. By adding the dollar sign to the end, it's the computer account.