The present disclosure provides short-term optical recovery systems and methods in coherent optical receivers to 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. 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 further expedite recovery of a signal. The expedited acquisition engine leverages on a frequency aligned Local Oscillator (LO) as well as pre-calculated dispersion maps and equalizer coefficients.