I have an HP 820 G4 laptop that dual boots to windows11 and also to linux mint 21.3 Virginia. The hard drive has an EFI partition for Windows, and upon bootup, the grub menu appears to select which OS to boot to. I have successfully been doing incremental and full images on the Windows partition. URBackup images the C:, ESP and SYSVOL partitions. When booted to Mint, only a full image will run (not incrementals which I think is expected), and it images the “C” partition where mint is installed. I have successfully restored the entire disk by restoring the windows partition via the URBackup restore USB GUI, and then manually restoring the Mint image backup to its partition. All necessary boot and other partitions are restored. So all working as expected.
Today I updated the URBackup server from 2.5.30.0 to 2.5.33.0. I also updated URBackup client in Windows to 2.5.25. And on Mint I ran the command TF=$(mktemp) && wget “https://hndl.urbackup.org/Client/2.5.25/UrBackup%20Client%20Linux%202.5.25.sh” -O $TF && sudo sh $TF; rm -f $TF to upgrade the client to 2.5.25.
Rebooted server and both dual boot environments. When booted to Windows, images and file backups still run as expected. However in Mint, a full image now immediately fails with the error “Backing up EFI System Partition failed. Image backup failed”. The backup immediately stops and doesn’t move on to the partition where mint is installed.
In Mint, I reverted back to the 2.5.20 client version of URBackup. And an image of the mint partition started working again as it was before.
So something has changed between the 2.5.20 and 2.5.25 linux clients. As far as I know I can’t exclude the EFI partition in the URBackup settings in Mint. Anyone have any other ideas how to get the 2.5.25 client to work as it was before?
Which snapshotting method did you choose when re/installing the client?
Was there any reason you didn’t choose to use/download the client using the “Download client for Linux” pull down on the urbackup web interface “status” menu?
I ask the latter because I have found that otherwise - I have to do more “re-setting” up of the linux client. (May just be my own incompetence though 
)
Backing up of EFI has/is potentially problematical. See this and subsequent reply by Uroni.
Which snapshotting method did you choose when re/installing the client?
Was there any reason you didn’t choose to use/download the client using the “Download client for Linux” pull down on the urbackup web interface “status” menu?
I ask the latter because I have found that otherwise - I have to do more “re-setting” up of the linux client.
I haven’t had any trouble with client settings installing from terminal. Happy for the suggestion though. I removed urbackup from the linux mint installation. And then used the “Download client for Linux” and re-installed it. Unfortunately same problem, image dies immediately with the above-mentioned EFI partition error. I then re-installed the 2.5.20 client from terminal, and the image backup ran successfully. It looks like in the 2.5.20 client, if the EFI can’t be backed up, it skips it and continues on with the next partition. The 2.5.25 client does not.
I looked at the other topic you mentioned. It looks like Uroni’s update to try and get EFI backup working is making the EFI partition image if it exists mandatory. Which in my scenario, and anyone’s dual boot scenario with windows, will stop the previously-working linux image. If you aren’t dual-booting then you wouldn’t have an EFI partition, so the 2.5.25 client linux image would probably work.
I would imagine there are a lot of dual boot systems, and will be more in the future. Since the EFI partition would be successfully imaged with the windows image, it is not necessary that the linux image back it up. I wonder if an option can be added in the linux client to make “EFI partition image” optional?