What is the risk of losing all the DB data, transactions, etc for a given period of time. What is the loss to the business in terms of immediate productivity,

What is the risk of losing all the DB data, transactions, etc for a given period of time. What is the loss to the business in terms of immediate productivity, long term recovery, reputation, legal repercussions even? I worked in an environment that spent half a million each on a few pieces of specialized hardware but difficulty convincing management to spend less than $100k to replace the 8yo, dated, slow database server now managing 8x the payload as when it was first deployed. It's sometimes exceedingly difficult to justify replacing something seen as "working fine"