My experience may shed some light on this: I use pgdump to make backups of an important PostgreSQL server and I thought I was done. Then the server died. I then used the standard import... but it failed. This was a while ago, but pgdump didn't preserve/escape some of the weird quoting in my strings or I (most likely) didn't understand hot to use pgdump properly. I hand to manually figure this out and fix the strings in the file before it would import. If I had tested the full restore, then I would have not have had to panic. Thankfully pgdump didn't throw up it's hands and not emit the strings - they would have been a decent and reasonably sane choice as well. I got lucky.