Just days before the first Merseyside derby match of the 2008-09 Premier League season, Liverpool Football Club has been helping out its rivals from Everton with a bit of IT advice.

Everton has implemented a new online data backup system from Backup Technology - a service already being used by Liverpool.

According to the vendor, "Everton acted on the advice of Liverpool Football Club", a show of generosity that fans will not expect when the two teams meet on Saturday.

Everton had previously relied on a tape backup system for its two terabytes of files, including emails and databases for ticketing, merchandising and customer relationship management.

But the old system was proving too time consuming, according to Everton's head of IT Stephen Fell.

"A member of staff had to spend about two hours every morning ensuring that the overnight backup had gone OK and that there were no errors," he said.

"There was also a security concern because tapes were stored at the office and transferred to another site once a month, making them potentially vulnerable to damage, theft or loss."

Data is now transferred automatically to Backup Technology's data centre, improving disaster recovery as well as saving money.

"If an email server fails we can restore the data to another server and have the whole lot up and running within 24 hours," said Fell.

"If someone loses a file, even a single email, it can be recovered within minutes rather than the couple of hours it used to take. So I have peace of mind and can sleep at night without worrying.

"In addition to reduced administration time, there are cost savings in not having to buy tapes, backup hardware and software licences.

"Another advantage is that instead of building up massive tape archives we can have all the data archived and available online for as long as we need it."

Liverpool FC has been using the online backup service since early 2007.