Those large tech companies probably had a team or teams of people whose job is to look after the backups for production servers.

Backups generally have "god mode" access (best description) as they need to backup and restore not just filesystem data, but the audit log data as well.

Most (corp) places I worked, the developers and SysAdmin's working on production servers gave little thought to the backup component apart from making sure the software is installs and runs. ;)