Another Best Buy Horror Story

The Consumerist has just put out this report:

I am writing to you because my husband and I are really getting the run around from Best Buy.

We bought a PC about 5 years ago, which has become our children's computer. It was in good condition, except the CD player in it was broken. We bought the extended warranty for the computer so we brought the tower in to the (redacted), NH store to get the CD replaced over 3 weeks ago. We declined backing up the data (a $100 charge) since replacing the CD drive is not a big deal, and does not require any work to be done to the hard drive. My husband would have replaced the CD drive himself, but then it would invalidate the warranty.

We found out this week that there was actually more work done to the computer than just what we had requested. In fact, our entire hard drive was replaced, thus all of the data is now gone! Apparently there were other things wrong with the computer than what we thought and the Geek Squad thought it would be in everyone's best interest to replace the hard drive. In fact, the Geek Squad replaced so much on the computer that the value of the work that they did is well over the amount of money that the computer is even worth!!! If we thought there was even a chance that our data was in jeopardy, we definitely would have backed it up ourselves, or paid the $100 to have it backed up.

So, to make a long story short, the Best Buy Geek Squad is asking that we pay about $1,700 in for lab fees, an external hard drive and labor in order to MAYBE aquire about 80% of the data from my computer. When we called their corporate office, after a 2 hour phone call, my husband was told that the corporate office, "does not negotiate fees". Corporate Office called the GM from the Best Buy in (redacted), NH and they are giving us a $200 gift card that we can use to pay towards the fee.

We need your help! We do not have an extra $1,500 to get our data back! We are losing thousands of photos of our children, and a lot of personal and professional files. I now know that we should always back up our data, but honestly, we were just getting the CD drive changed! We didn't want anything else done to the computer! It was working just fine! We truly feel like we are being wronged here.

I just need to know what to do next? Do we pay the fee and then sue them? We could put it on our Best Buy credit card (interest free for 18 months) although I really don't want to.