Better way to restore to existing pg database

We want to restore to an existing 9.3 pg database. What we ended up doing was:

1) delete the database and recreate again, 
2) use pg_restore to restore. 
3) reboot the ubuntu server to allow rails app to pick up the new database. 

We tried the following pg_restore command and it did not restore to an existing database:

$pg_restore --dbname=existing_database --verbose /home/myname/dbbackup.backup

There was no change of existing_database after pg_restore. Is there a command we can restore to an existing pg database without deleting it first as we did? We have to use command line. Many thanks.