Do I have to drop the gis DB to update OSM?

I previously had downloaded a metro extract from the OSM metro extracts page, and now found a site that offers individual state extract PBFs. I followed the instructions at http://switch2osm.org/loading-osm-data/ and for some reason the new data I imported, while it did not error out or anything and is taking up the additional space - is not displaying when I view my tile server.

I did a rm -fr /var/lib/tile as well as service restarts on apache2 & renderd, and after that didn't work even fully rebooted the machine. It's still stuck looking like it's "cached" the old tiles and isn't displaying the new "larger area" of data.

In psql, I did a \dt and it shows the same # of tables and table names. The size of the database, again, has increased - was ~270 MBs and is now ~862 MBs - so the data IS in there, just not displaying.

Do I have to drop the gis database and re-create it from the templates? Or is there an easier way to update this data?

Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit