Better way to restore to existing pg database
The command you showed looks fine.

pg_restore -d target_database /path/to/the/backup.dbbackup


At a guess, there were errors during the restore but you didn't see them. Most likely you were running with a user ID that did not have the correct permissions to perform the restore.

If you are certain that there is no data of any value in the target database (which will be deleted by the following command) try:

sudo -u postgres pg_restore --create --clean -d postgres /path/to/dbbackup.sql


If you have issues, post the output in an edit to your question, then comment here.

Also: You do not need to restart the server. At most, you should restart your Rails application. Usually that means restarting Apache, but it depends a bit on how you're running Rails. Restarting the whole server is completely unnecessary.