The existing methods for network recovery are often complex and seldom used by network administrators. In this paper we present a novel approach for global and local recovery named Resilient Routing Layers (RRL). The method is supported by algorithms, but also simple enough for a network administrator to implement by hand for reasonably sized networks. The idea in our approach is that for each node in the network there is a topology subset called a “safe layer”, which can handle any traffc affected by a fault in the node itself, or any of its links. By analysis using different network topologies, we demonstrate that our approach performs well compared to other comparable methods. Particularly, we demonstrate RRLs performance for backup-path lengths and state information overhead that are assumed to be the weakest parameters for our method. We discuss implementation issues of RRL, and demonstrate its applicability to MPLS networks.