How Canberra's government agencies ended up drowning in duplicate digital images — and what it's costing them

The problem did not arrive overnight. Across Canberra's dense corridor of federal departments — from the glass towers along Northbourne Avenue to the sprawling Service Australia campus in Tuggeranong — digital asset libraries have quietly ballooned with duplicate images: the same photograph stored four, five, sometimes a dozen times across different servers, shared drives and cloud platforms. By mid-2026, the administrative cost of managing that redundancy has become impossible to ignore.

The immediate trigger is a broader digital-asset audit now under way across the Australian Public Service following the federal government's updated Digital Continuity 2025 policy framework, which required agencies to demonstrate consolidated, searchable records by June 30 this year. That deadline has exposed a structural mess decades in the making.

How the pile-up happened

The story starts, in part, with the National Archives of Australia on Queen Victoria Terrace in Parkes. When the Archives accelerated its digitisation push through the 2010s — scanning physical records and photographs at scale — agencies receiving those digital transfers often had no standardised naming convention and no deduplication protocol. Files landed in whatever folder a staff member happened to open that week.

The Australian National University Library, which runs parallel digitisation programs for its Noel Butlin Archives Centre in Acton, encountered the same issue. Archivists there have described managing multiple generations of scanned images where earlier low-resolution versions were never purged after higher-resolution replacements were created. The result: storage tiers carrying redundant weight across every project going back to at least 2008.

Then came COVID-19. Between March 2020 and late 2021, thousands of Canberra public servants shifted to remote work almost overnight. Departments like the Department of Finance and the Department of Home Affairs provisioned emergency cloud storage on platforms including Microsoft SharePoint and AWS GovCloud. Staff uploading working images for remote collaboration rarely cross-checked whether those files already existed on the agency's central server. Many never returned to tidy up. Internal reviews conducted by the Australian Public Service Commission since 2023 have flagged uncontrolled cloud storage proliferation as one of the top five data-governance risks across the APS.

Housing policy has added an unlikely dimension to the problem locally. As the ACT government's Suburban Land Agency ramped up development approvals in Gungahlin and Belconnen — processing hundreds of planning images, site photographs and renders each month — its records team struggled to integrate those files with the existing Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate image library. Staff in both Gungahlin and the city office were, at points, maintaining separate copies of the same development render with no automated flag to catch the overlap.

The cost of doing nothing

Enterprise cloud storage in Australia is not cheap. Microsoft Azure's Australian data-centre pricing for government-tier blob storage currently sits at roughly $23 to $28 per terabyte per month at standard access tiers, depending on the agreement in place. When an agency is carrying three or four copies of the same high-resolution image — and large departments can hold image libraries running into hundreds of terabytes — the monthly overhead compounds fast.

Deduplication software vendors working with Canberra agencies quote typical redundancy rates of between 30 and 60 percent in government image libraries that have never been actively managed. A conservative 30 percent reduction across a 200-terabyte library translates to roughly $1,600 to $2,000 saved per month, before factoring in staff time spent searching through cluttered, poorly labelled archives.

Several ACT government directorates are now trialling automated deduplication tools as part of their compliance response to the Digital Continuity deadline. The Territory Records Office, based in Dickson, is coordinating that work, though no public completion date has been set for all agencies.

For public servants working through the clean-up, the practical advice from digital records specialists is consistent: prioritise naming-convention reform before adding any new images to a shared library, run a deduplication scan on cloud storage before the next billing cycle closes, and nominate a single team member in each branch as the records custodian. The filing problem is solvable. The harder question is whether agencies will hold the line once the audit pressure lifts.