Why is pg_restore returning successfully but not actually restoring my database?

I have a Postgres 8.4 database on a linux server that I have dumped using the following command:

pg_dump --format=c --exclude-table=log --file=/path/to/output my_db

I then ftp the created file to my local Windows 7 machine and attempt to restore the file to my local Postgres 8.4 instance using the following command:

pg_restore --create --exit-on-error --verbose c:\path\to\file

The restore command generates plenty of output claiming it created my database, connected to it, and then created all the other tables as expected. However, when I view the databases on my local machine through pgAdmin the restored database doesn't exist at all.

In an attempt to troubleshoot I tried the following command:

pg_restore --create --exit-on-error --verbose --host=blahblah --username=no_one c:\path\to\file

When I run this command even though the host and username given are complete nonsense I still get the exact same output from the command without any errors.

Has anyone run into this before or know what could by causing this?

You have to add the name of a valid database to initially connect to or it will just dump the contents to STDOUT:

pg_restore --create --exit-on-error --verbose --dbname=postgres <backup_file>

This is still confusing, I attempted to execute this thing that the --dbname should be the db I want to create.

pg_restore --create --exit-on-error --verbose --dbname=jiradb jiradb.tar

WRONG!!

It should literally be --dbname=postgres, the --create then will create the real db from the name in the file. In my case, I restored from a tar backup with

pg_restore --create --exit-on-error --verbose --dbname=postgres jiradb.tar