Short-term optical recovery systems and methods in coherent optical receivers minimize recovery time for fault scenarios and signal reacquisition while maintaining robust signal acquisition. The short-term optical recovery systems and methods include special techniques and algorithms to minimize recovery time, making coherent systems similar in time as conventional direct detection recovery. The short-term optical recovery systems and methods include an expedited acquisition engine that includes a reference clock recovery, a compensator to remove chromatic dispersion, a burst framer, and a compensator to remove polarization dispersion. Importantly, the expedited acquisition engine uses a memory oriented architecture to allow some properties of the acquisition engine to be stored during initial acquisition and, hence, later on be deployed in any fault scenario to expedite further recovery of a signal.