Canberra's Digital Archive Problem by the Numbers: The Hidden Cost of Duplicate Images in Government Records

Canberra's public sector holds more duplicate digital images per capita than any other city in Australia, according to data management researchers at the Australian National University's College of Engineering, Computing and Cybernetics. The finding arrives at a moment when federal and territory agencies are under pressure to cut operational costs, and storage budgets are increasingly hard to justify to ministers focused on housing and infrastructure.

The problem is straightforward in principle but expensive in practice. When staff across agencies scan the same policy document twice, upload the same photograph to multiple shared drives, or migrate records between systems without deduplication checks, identical files accumulate. Each copy costs money to store, index, back up and secure. Across a city where roughly 40 per cent of the workforce is employed directly or indirectly by government, the scale is significant.

What the Numbers Actually Show

Industry benchmarks cited by the International Data Corporation suggest that between 25 and 40 per cent of files stored on enterprise networks are exact or near-exact duplicates. Applied to the ACT government's reported ICT storage footprint — which the ACT Budget 2025-26 noted had grown substantially in line with digital service expansion — even a conservative 30 per cent duplication rate represents tens of terabytes of redundant data across directorates. The University of Canberra's Institute for Governance has flagged records management efficiency as a recurring theme in its public sector research, with duplicated digital assets identified as a contributor to inflated storage costs in shared government environments.

The National Archives of Australia, headquartered on Queen Victoria Terrace in Parkes, has for several years maintained guidance urging agencies to conduct regular deduplication audits as part of digital continuity planning. Despite that guidance, agencies migrating to cloud platforms — a process that accelerated significantly after 2020 — often replicated entire legacy folder structures, duplicates included, rather than clean-migrating verified unique files. The cost of cloud storage in Australian government contracts varies, but per-gigabyte rates for high-availability tiers used by sensitive agencies are substantially higher than consumer equivalents.

At the territory level, the ACT's Digital Strategy, which set targets through 2025, prioritised citizen-facing service digitisation over backend data hygiene. That sequencing made sense politically — residents in Gungahlin and Belconnen wanted faster online permit approvals, not internal IT housekeeping — but it left a growing backlog of unexamined storage. ServiceNow implementation across several ACT directorates in recent years created new repositories that, in some cases, sat alongside rather than replacing older SharePoint environments, compounding the duplication issue.

The Practical Cost to Canberra Agencies

Storage is not the only expense. Duplicate images complicate Freedom of Information responses, slow down records searches during parliamentary inquiries, and create compliance headaches under the Territory Records Act 2002. Legal teams billing by the hour to review document productions have a direct financial incentive to flag this: when the same image appears fourteen times across a disclosure set, review time multiplies accordingly.

Deduplication software licences from vendors such as Veritas or Commvault typically run from tens of thousands of dollars annually for mid-sized government deployments upward, depending on data volume and integration requirements. For agencies already managing constrained ICT budgets — the ACT Government's Digital, Technology and Innovation directorate has faced competing demands between light rail stage 2 connectivity projects and core systems maintenance — finding the capital for proactive storage remediation is genuinely difficult.

The near-term pressure point is the next whole-of-government ICT procurement cycle. Agencies that complete deduplication audits before renewing cloud storage contracts stand to negotiate meaningfully better per-gigabyte rates, or simply require less capacity. ANU researchers working with the Digital Transformation Agency have recommended that agencies run automated hash-comparison scans — a technical process that identifies bit-for-bit identical files — before any major system migration. It costs relatively little to run and can reduce migration data volumes by a quarter or more. For a Canberra bureaucracy preparing for the next generation of digital service platforms, that arithmetic is worth taking seriously before the contracts land on the minister's desk.