it's more or less okay yea.
just make sure, whenever you leave online, you press start, then go to online, then press leave online and take yourself back to the main story.
Also, if when you join online it says "cloud servers unavailable" or words to that effect, you DO NOT (!!!) press retry - this is said to be the reason for deleted characters.
So, leave through the start menu, and do not click retry and you should be A-ok