How Canberra's Government Agencies Got Buried in Duplicate Images — and What Happened Next

Federal agencies headquartered in Canberra are carrying hundreds of thousands of duplicate image files across shared network drives and cloud repositories — a problem that built quietly over two decades of inconsistent digital record-keeping and has now become expensive enough to force a structured response.

The issue is not new, but its scale became undeniable after the Australian Public Service Commission flagged digital asset management as a priority area in its broader public sector capability review work. Agencies storing redundant files on platforms such as Microsoft SharePoint and AWS GovCloud are paying for storage they do not need, and staff are spending unquantified hours locating authoritative versions of images for publications, ministerial briefings, and web content.

How the Problem Accumulated

Three distinct waves of behaviour drove the duplication crisis. First, the pre-cloud era of the 2000s and early 2010s saw Canberra-based departments maintain separate server infrastructure at locations including the Bowes Street data facility in Phillip and internal server rooms at the Department of Finance's Newland House site in Parkes. Teams copied image assets onto local drives, shared folders, and email chains with no centralised naming convention or version control.

Second, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a rushed shift to remote work beginning in March 2020. Staff working from homes in Belconnen, Gungahlin, and Tuggeranong downloaded agency image libraries to personal and departmental laptops, then re-uploaded subsets to collaboration tools including Microsoft Teams and Dropbox Business accounts provisioned quickly outside normal procurement channels. By mid-2021, multiple departments had acknowledged internally that their image inventories had fragmented across at least three separate storage environments simultaneously.

Third, whole-of-government cloud consolidation, which accelerated after the Australian Government's Digital Continuity 2020 policy came into effect, prompted mass migration of legacy file servers to centralised cloud platforms. Migration teams, under deadline pressure to decommission on-premise hardware, frequently copied rather than moved file directories — replicating existing duplicates and adding a new layer of redundancy on top of them.

The Australian National University's digital humanities researchers at the Chifley Library precinct identified analogous problems in academic image repositories as far back as 2019, publishing findings that described how institutional drives at research universities accumulate duplicate photographic records at a rate that roughly doubles every four years without active intervention. That research, while focused on academic settings, circulated widely inside Canberra's public service digital reform community.

The Cost of Doing Nothing

Cloud storage is not free. Under standard Australian Government panel pricing through the Digital Transformation Agency's Cloud Marketplace, storage costs vary by provider and tier, but agencies managing unstructured data at scale face meaningful recurring expenditure. Independent assessments of mid-sized federal departments — those with between 2,000 and 5,000 staff — have estimated that unmanaged duplicate file accumulation can account for between 20 and 35 per cent of total cloud storage spend, though the specific figures vary considerably by agency and have not been consolidated into a single public report.

The ACT Government's own digital directorate, operating out of offices on Constitution Avenue in Reid, launched a duplicate-detection audit of Shared Services ICT holdings in late 2024. The audit covered image assets used across ACT Health, Transport Canberra, and the Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate. Results of that audit have not been made public, but procurement records show the directorate engaged a Canberra-based data management firm to assist with remediation work through 2025.

At the federal level, the Digital Transformation Agency updated its guidance on digital asset governance in January 2025, recommending agencies implement automated hash-based duplicate detection before any future cloud migration rather than after the fact.

For agencies still working through their own libraries, the practical path forward involves three steps that digital archivists and records managers consistently recommend: run a file-hash comparison across all storage environments to identify exact duplicates, establish a single source-of-truth repository with enforced naming standards, and build decommissioning of redundant storage into annual ICT budget reviews rather than treating it as a one-off project. For Canberra's public service, where image assets underpin everything from ministerial web pages to parliamentary committee submissions, getting the library clean is less a technical exercise than a governance one.