I was getting the following error when using pg_restore to restore from a Postgres backup:

pg_restore: [custom archiver] could not read from input file: end of file

I’d created the dump file by piping the output of pg_dump into a file:

pg_dump -Fc database > backup.dump

The problem was caused because I was piping the output of pg_dump. This seems to work when dumping the database in SQL format, but not when dumping in the compressed binary format with the -Fc flag.

The solution was to use the -f file flag, rather then a pipe, to capture the output of pg_dump

pg_dump -Fc -f backup.dump database