Abstract: In a system for appliance back-up, a primary appliance is coupled to a network, whereby the primary appliance receives requests or commands and sends a status message over the network to a standby appliance, which indicates that the primary appliance is operational. If the standby appliance does not receive the status message or the status message is invalid, the standby appliance writes a shutdown message to a storage device. The primary appliance then reads the shutdown message stored in the storage device and disables itself from processing requests or commands. When the primary appliance completes these tasks, it disables communication connections and writes a shutdown completion message to the storage device. The standby appliance reads the shutdown completion message from the storage device and initiates a start-up procedure.