[masterof0]

Good for you. Most people don't want Microsoft to own their data. You get that? User's data belong to them, if you are set to share all your personal data with Microsoft , then it should be an opt-in process (maybe they can entice you with Bing points or some sort of rewards?). It should be offline by default. As customer are already paying for the operating system. You can also use many syncing solutions from Google drive to dropbox, and many others. Regarding the "amount of time I spend worrying about hard drive failure" , never have I had a hard drive that just dies, is possible , but extremely unlikely, I make a backup of my important stuffs to other hard drives or the cloud. Cloud sign-on is just another way to track users and violates their basic privacy rights.