Phidiax Tech Blog

I recently came across a write permission error when backing up the database master key encryption to a file. I was running SSMS as the Administrator and executed  below SQL statement:

           BACKUP master key to file = N'\\SharedFolder\Keys\database_DEV_master.key'
                ENCRYPTION by
                PASSWORD = N'SupperStrongPassword$$$'

However the below error occurred:  

           [Cannot write into file '\\SharedFolder\Keys\database_DEV_master.key'.
           Verify that you have write permissions, that the file path is valid,
           and that the file does not already exist.]

The error looked obvious but it took me a while to recognize that SSMS was using SQL service account to execute SQL statement.  

To fix the problem, I gave SQL service account "write" permission to the network shared folder and re-ran the SQL statement.