Postgres: Restoring A Filesystem Backup

i had to do a file system back up because of the size of my database.

i shutdown postmaster and tar'd the files.

i recently reloaded my OS and now i'm attempting to restore the backups. i first shut down postmaster, restored the backups to the data folder and restarted postmaster.

i then su'd from root to postgres user:

Code:
[postgres@austin1 pgsql]$ psql service_2_3
psql: FATAL: database "service_2_3" does not exist
DETAIL: The database subdirectory "base/16385" is missing.

the backups had a database named service_2_3 but upon restoring the backups, it doesn't seem to be available.

my data directory is /var/pgsql/data.

Code:
[postgres@austin1 pgsql]$ ls -lahR /var/pgsql/ | grep 16385
but that yielded nothing.

have i done something wrong while backing up? i don't think i have since i followed the postgres manual when backing up. but the administrators have not been very thorough with how they've set the system up for me.

how i can resolve this issue if you have the time.