You can back up and restore your VMS database with the HTTP REST API. This guide walks you through creating a binary database backup and restoring your system from a backup file using Python.

Prerequisites

Before running the Python scripts, ensure you meet the following requirements:

• Local user account: Access to an active local user account with administrative privileges in Nx Witness.

• Authentication token: A valid bearer or session token for authorization. For detailed instructions on generating tokens, see Authentication through the REST API.

• Python environment: Python 3 installed with the standard requests, datetime, json, and base64 libraries.

Back up the system database

Creating a system backup generates a binary dump of your VMS database and saves it as a local file.

To fetch the database, send a GET request to the /rest/v4/site/database endpoint.

The following Python script authenticates your request, downloads the database payload, saves it as a timestamped binary file (systembackup_<MM-DD-YYYY-HH-MM-SS>.db), and revokes the session token.

get_method_header = create_header(primary_token)

system_backup = request_api(LOCAL_URL, f'/rest/v4/site/database', 'GET', verify=False, headers=get_method_header)

delete_method_header = create_header(secondary_token)

request_api(LOCAL_URL, f'/rest/v4/login/sessions/{secondary_token}', 'DELETE', verify=False, headers=delete_method_header)

backup_time = datetime.now().strftime('%m-%d-%Y-%H-%M-%S')

with open(f'systembackup_{backup_time}.db', 'bw') as backup:
   backup.write(base64.b64decode(system_backup["data"]))

Restore the system database

Restoring the system database overwrites your current database configuration with the contents of a previously saved backup file.

To restore the database, send a POST request to the /rest/v4/site/database endpoint containing your encoded database backup file.

1. Open your Python script.

2. Replace 'FILENAME' with the actual path and name of your backup file (for example, 'systembackup_08-27-2026-10-15-00.db').

3. Run the following code:

filename = 'FILENAME'  # replace FILENAME with your backup file

with open(f'{filename}', 'br') as recovery:
   recovery_file = recovery.read()
   recovery_file = json.dumps({"data": base64.b64encode(recovery_file).decode()})

get_method_header = create_header(primary_token)

request_api(LOCAL_URL, f'/rest/v4/site/database', 'POST', verify=False, headers={**get_method_header, 'Content-type':'application/json'}, data=recovery_file)

delete_method_header = create_header(secondary_token)