Resiliency to link failures in optical networks is becoming increasingly important due to the increasing data rate in the fiber. Path protection schemes attempt to guarantee a backup path for a connection upon a failure in the network, thereby reducing the recovery time for a connection. In this paper, we develop a failure dependent path protection scheme that dynamically assigns a primary path and backup paths, one for each failure that would affect the primary path. A connection established on the primary path will be re-established on its backup path only if a failure in the network affects the connection. We evaluate the performance of our developed protocol and compare with an alternative approach based on sub-graph routing that achieves high network utilization and low blocking probability at the cost of re-establishing connections even if the failure in the network does not affect the primary path of the connection. We observe that up to a factor of eight reduction in the number of reconfiguration scenarios is achieved with less than 10% reduction in effective network utilization and less than 3% reduction in fairness metrics for tolerating any single link failure in NSFNET and ARPA-2 networks. The failure dependent protection approach developed in this paper is also applicable to any general failure scenarios that are modeled as shared risk link group failures.