The Numbers Behind Canberra's Duplicate Image Problem: What the Data Actually Shows

Canberra's public sector holds more duplicate digital images than most agencies care to admit. Across the ACT government's shared storage infrastructure, duplicate image files — identical or near-identical photographs, scanned documents and graphic assets stored multiple times across different directories and platforms — account for a disproportionate share of ballooning data costs. The problem is not unique to Canberra, but in a city where almost every major employer draws from the federal or territory public service, the financial and administrative consequences land with unusual weight.

The timing matters. Federal agencies based in the Parliamentary Triangle and along Northbourne Avenue are midway through a Commonwealth-mandated digital records modernisation program, with departments required to align with the National Archives of Australia's Digital Continuity 2025 policy. That deadline has sharpened internal audits, and what those audits keep finding is redundancy at scale — the same scanned ministerial briefs saved six times over, event photographs duplicated across shared drives, grant-reporting imagery stored separately by three different teams within a single directorate.

What the Figures Reveal

Industry benchmarks from the information management sector suggest duplicate files can consume anywhere between 20 and 40 percent of an organisation's total storage volume, depending on how long the archive has been allowed to grow unmanaged. For a mid-sized ACT government directorate running several terabytes of shared storage, that translates directly into unnecessary infrastructure expenditure — cloud storage pricing in the Australian market currently sits around $23 to $35 per terabyte per month for enterprise-grade services, meaning a directorate holding even 10 terabytes of redundant image data could be spending upwards of $4,200 a year on files that serve no operational purpose.

The Australian National University's digital collections team in Acton has publicly discussed the challenge of managing photographic archives across multiple faculties and research units, where images from fieldwork, conferences and publications accumulate rapidly and without consistent naming conventions. The University of Canberra, based in Bruce, faces similar pressures as its research output has grown. Neither institution has released specific duplication rates for their holdings, but both are understood to be investing in deduplication tooling as part of broader library and records upgrades.

At the ACT Government's Shared Services ICT infrastructure, which supports agencies including the Health Directorate and Transport Canberra, storage rationalisation has been a recurring agenda item since at least 2023. The territory's budget papers have consistently flagged digital infrastructure as a priority investment area without breaking out specific line items for storage redundancy remediation.

The Local Audit Picture

Deduplication software works by generating a unique hash — essentially a digital fingerprint — for every file. When two files produce the same hash, the system flags them as identical and allows administrators to remove all but one copy, replacing the others with pointers to the single retained file. The process is automated, but the decision about what to delete — and what to keep — still requires human oversight, particularly in government contexts where file provenance and audit trails carry legal significance.

For Canberra's public service workforce, concentrated in precincts stretching from Barton through to Belconnen, that oversight question has bureaucratic teeth. The Archives Act 1983 imposes obligations on Commonwealth agencies to maintain complete and accurate records, which means a deduplication program cannot simply blast through a shared drive without first establishing that the retained copy meets records-management standards.

Practical advice for agencies and institutions currently running audits: start with image-heavy repositories — shared event photography folders, scanned-document archives and web-content asset libraries tend to carry the highest duplication rates. Prioritise those directories before tackling structured databases, where the deduplication logic becomes more complex. Agencies using Microsoft 365 environments, which is standard across most ACT and Commonwealth workplaces, have access to built-in storage analytics tools that can surface duplicate file clusters without requiring additional procurement. Running that report before the next budget cycle closes is the fastest way to put a real number on a cost that, until now, has mostly stayed invisible.