In this paper, we study the survivable routing, modulation, and spectrum assignment (S-RMSA) problem for bulk data- flow transfer in elastic optical networks. We design a two- dimensional resource model for specifying resource state information that spans both the spectrum and time dimensions, and we develop a dynamic heuristic RMSA algorithm, Max Resource Utilization (MRU), to efficiently transfer data-flows while meeting deadline constraints and surviving single link failures. Furthermore, we provide a protection resource optimization strategy to progressively release the scheduled protection resources so as to increase spectrum utilization. We examine the performance of our proposed algorithm, and numerical results show that our proposed heuristic algorithm can reduce blocking probability and obtain high spectrum utilization while minimizing fragmentation.