Duplicate Images in Government Records: What Officials, Experts and Key Figures Are Saying

Federal agencies based in the parliamentary triangle are sitting on millions of duplicate digital images embedded in official records, and the pressure to clean them up is intensifying. The problem — long dismissed as a low-priority IT nuisance — has moved up the agenda after the National Archives of Australia flagged digital record integrity as a priority area for 2026, with agencies required to audit their holdings against updated disposal authorities by December 31 this year.

The issue matters now for a specific reason. The Australian Government's Digital Continuity 2020 policy, which has been extended informally by the Department of Finance as agencies struggle with compliance, set expectations that records be stored in formats that are accessible, complete and free of redundant data. Duplicate images — the same scanned document saved three or four times across different folders, shared drives and cloud repositories — directly undermine that goal. For a city where the public service is the dominant employer, the administrative and cost consequences are local and immediate.

What the Experts Are Saying

Academics at the Australian National University's School of Computing are among those tracking the problem. Researchers there have pointed to the proliferation of hybrid working arrangements since 2020 as a key driver: staff saving the same document locally, to a shared drive, and then again to an agency's cloud environment has become routine. The ANU's College of Engineering, Computing and Cybernetics has published work on automated deduplication tools, noting that without a clear agency policy, even good software produces inconsistent results.

The University of Canberra's iSchool — housed on the Kirinari Street campus in Bruce — has a longstanding focus on records and information management. Practitioners who have come through that program and now work in agencies along Northbourne Avenue and in the Woden precinct say the operational fix is straightforward in theory: run a hash-based deduplication scan, confirm with a records manager, then archive or destroy according to the relevant disposal authority. The complication is governance. Agencies need a human decision-maker to sign off on destruction, and in a risk-averse public service culture, sign-offs get delayed.

The Australian Society of Archivists, which counts many Canberra-based members among its national membership, has been consistent in its guidance that deduplication is not a purely technical exercise. The Society's published standards emphasise that a duplicate image is only safe to remove once provenance — which system created the original, and when — has been confirmed.

The Cost of Doing Nothing

Storage is not free. Government agencies pay for cloud infrastructure through whole-of-government contracts managed by the Digital Transformation Agency, and redundant data volumes directly inflate those costs. Industry estimates — drawn from cloud vendor pricing structures publicly available through the DTA's procurement panel — suggest that a mid-sized agency storing 10 terabytes of duplicate image data could be paying tens of thousands of dollars annually in avoidable storage fees.

At the ACT government level, the territory's own records authority under the Territory Records Act 2002 places similar obligations on directorates. The ACT State Records Office, based in Cannons Court in the city centre, has previously reminded directorates that digital images of physical documents are subject to the same disposal rules as the originals. A duplicate scan does not create a second original — it creates a liability.

Several Gungahlin-based Service ACT offices, which handle high volumes of scanned identity documents and application forms, have been working through a backlog of duplicate records generated during the COVID-era surge in online lodgements. That process is ongoing.

For public servants working through the problem, the practical next step is straightforward: contact the agency's records management team before running any automated tool, confirm which copy is the authoritative record, and lodge a disposal request through the relevant system — whether that is HPE Content Manager, Microsoft SharePoint with a records overlay, or a legacy TRIM instance. The National Archives' online Recordkeeping Advice portal has updated guidance published this year. Getting the governance step right before touching a file is, by all accounts, the part most agencies are still learning.