Availability is an important attribute of optical transport networks, and is enabled through many alternative restoration schemes. Different restoration schemes tradeoff network cost, as measured by provisioned capacity, and network reliability to match diverse application needs. We provide a systematic quantification of these tradeoffs for commonly employed restoration schemes and illustrate them for several networks. In this paper, we analyze a dedicated capacity 1+1 protection scheme and two commonly employed shared capacity mesh restoration schemes: path and link based restoration.