Can I use pg_restore to restore data to subset of tables?
From pg_restore's documentation you can see:


  -t table
  --table=table

Restore definition and/or data of named table only.
Multiple tables may be specified with multiple -t switches.
This can be combined with the -n option to specify a schema.



Highlighting "Multiple tables may be specified with multiple -t switches", which means that you can use -t switch multiple times, and your example would work as:

pg_restore -a -d ACMETEST -n public -v -U acme -t hardware -t location /var/acme/backups/restore/ACMEDatabase.bak


As seen, I just used -t hardware -t location instead of -t hardware,location.