Stuck (again) trying to move a 7.x app and database to 8.2

Hi all. I asked this question back on January and got a lot of helpful
advice, but I never did get the thing up and running. Now that I have
time again, I need to get an application and database running on a
Debian machine with PSQL 7.x running on a Fedora machine running 8.2.

Here's what I've done:

1) I installed 8.2 on the new machine. The installation doesn't complain
about anything, and 'initdb' says it inited stuff.

2) The old database makes daily backups with a command like 'pg_dump -U
backup -Ft -b data > 20070615.tar'

3) I copied the 20070615.tar file over to the new machine and tried
restoring it with 'pg_restore 20070615.tar'

I will admit I don't know SQL enough to know how to view the data in the
interactive terminal, but my app knew how to extract data and it says
there's no data in the database.

Did I miss some obvious, critical step? I would appreciate any
suggestions you may have, or better yet, if there's one of you out there
that would like to consult for a few hours, I would gladly pay for your
time (in the Boston, MA area) to fix this stupid thing.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Howard