Occasionally, you need to dump a remote database and restore it locally. Many strategies exist for achieveing this end. The following outines one path to succes.
Go to remote location (e.g., a server, your friend's computer), and run:
pg_dump -Fc -U postgres opencivicdata > /tmp/ocd.dump
-Fc tells postgres to use a custom format archive file, which compresses the dump into a relatively smaller file size. You can also employ the -Z argument to specify compression size.
On your local machine, retrieve the database from its remote location, for example:
scp ubuntu@ocd.datamade.us:/tmp/ocd.dump ~/Desktop
Then, restore it:
pg_restore -C -j4 --no-owner /tmp/ocd.dump | psql
The -C argument creates the database, and the -j4 argument tells psql to parallelize the process (i.e., use multiple threads and speed up the restore).