DSpace 9.1 AIP Restore: Assetstore Populated but Database Empty

[Sameer Alrasheed]

Dear DSpace Technical Support Team,

I am experiencing an issue while restoring an AIP backup in DSpace 9.1 and would appreciate your guidance.

I created a full AIP backup using:

sudo [dspace]/bin/dspace packager -d -a -t AIP -e <EMAIL> -i 123456789/0 <LOCATION>

The backup completed successfully (~81 GB, ~8.5K files, ~1 hour).

On a new server, I installed DSpace 9.1, copied the configuration from the original instance, and ran the restore using:
sudo [dspace]/bin/dspace packager -r -a -f -t AIP -e <EMAIL> -i 123456789/0 -o skipIfParentMissing=true <LOCATION>
The restore has been running for over 12 hours. I can see the assetstore directory growing (~10 GB so far), and dspace-cli.log shows many INFO messages such as:
create_bitstream  
add_bundle  
add_metadatavalue  
update_item  
delete_metadata_value
However, the PostgreSQL database still appears empty (e.g., item, bundle, bitstream tables show no records).

My questions are:
1. Is it expected that an AIP restore (especially with -r -f) runs as a single long transaction, with no database commits visible until completion?
2. Are there recommended ways to improve restore performance for large datasets (JVM tuning, restore modes, or other best practices)?

The restore is currently run with:
JAVA_OPTS="-Xms4g -Xmx8g -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8"

Thank you for your assistance.