Current approaches to providing robust network connections which are tolerant to failures involve restoration schemes which mainly focus on reserving backup paths. In this paper we propose a technique for which avoids the extra cost for reserving, by pre- identifying (but not reserving) the backup paths. We present and analyze an algorithm to solve this problem and study a practical special case in detail. Through simulations we show that our model is signifi- cantly more cost-efficient than backup path reservation. We also show how this model can fit into the MPLS architecture.