Cannot restore postgres dump on heroku

Question

I am using this command to create dump locally PGPASSWORD=admin pg_dump -h 127.0.0.1 -p 5432 -U postgres --no-owner --no-acl -f database.dump and my is created successfully.

then uploaded this dump to dropbox and make it public with this link http://www.dropbox.com/s/rsqeiuqzusejz5x/database.dump?dl=1 notice I have changed https to http and dl=0 to dl=1 (dl=1 to make it downloadable)

then on my terminal I am running this command heroku pg:backups:restore "http://www.dropbox.com/s/38prh2y7pdwhqqj/database.dump?dl=1" --confirm tranquil-anchorage-39635

but I am getting this error

 !    An error occurred and the backup did not finish.
 !
 !    pg_restore: error: did not find magic string in file header
 !    waiting for restore to complete
 !    pg_restore finished with errors
 !    waiting for download to complete
 !    download finished successfully
 !
 !    Run heroku pg:backups:info r010 for more details.

I have tried all the official documentation and various answers but nothing seems to work.

Answer 1

On doing further research I found out that pg_restore command while restoring dump file expects a certain format that must be mentioned while creating the dump file. That is why there was an error pg_restore: error: did not find magic string in file header.

pg_dump -h <localhost> -p <port> -U <username> --format=c <database_name> > daman.dump after running this command you will be prompt to enter the password for the user.

Notice --format=c in the above command. This will create a dump file in a format that can be restored by pg_restore, also I should mention that the dump file created in this manner is not readable to text-editor like notepad or vscode unlike the in the case when --format=c is not used.

for further details see the documentation here