How Canberra's Government Agencies Ended Up Drowning in Duplicate Images — And What It's Costing Them

ACT and federal government agencies operating out of Canberra are sitting on digital asset libraries bloated with duplicate images — some departments holding multiple versions of the same photograph, graphic or scanned document across four or five separate storage systems simultaneously. The problem has been building since at least the early 2000s, but a wave of rushed pandemic-era digitisation between 2020 and 2022 accelerated it dramatically, and the reckoning is now arriving in the form of storage costs, retrieval failures and compliance headaches.

The timing matters. The federal government's Digital Infrastructure Investment Plan, which sets targets for consolidated cloud storage across the Australian Public Service, has put pressure on agencies to audit their holdings before migrating to unified platforms. For Canberra, where the public service workforce dominates the local economy and government IT contracts underpin a significant slice of commercial activity in suburbs like Barton, Fyshwick and Phillip, the scale of the duplication problem is becoming impossible to ignore.

How the Mess Was Made

The roots go back to the machinery-of-government changes that reshaped federal agencies through the Howard, Rudd and Abbott years. Each restructure typically saw teams inherit legacy file servers from predecessor departments without any systematic deduplication. The National Archives of Australia, headquartered on Queen Victoria Terrace in Parkes, has documented this pattern in its digital preservation guidance: agencies migrating records often imported entire shared drives wholesale, duplicating content that had already been catalogued elsewhere.

At the ACT government level, the transition to cloud-based platforms under the territory's Digital Strategy — a program that accelerated after 2019 — created its own duplication layer. Agencies uploading records to new environments frequently did so without first reconciling what already existed, meaning a single scanned building permit or infrastructure photograph could end up stored in an on-premise server, a SharePoint environment and a cloud backup simultaneously. The Australian National University's 3A Institute, based on the Acton campus, has researched the broader problem of unstructured data governance in public sector contexts, and the duplicate image problem fits squarely within findings about how organisations systematically underestimate redundant data volumes.

The Canberra data centre corridor — concentrated around Hume and the broader Fyshwick precinct — has physically absorbed much of this growth. Commercial data storage costs in the ACT market have risen in line with national trends; industry analysts have pegged average enterprise cloud storage pricing in Australia at between $0.02 and $0.05 per gigabyte per month for standard tiers, and when agencies are unknowingly storing three or four copies of large image archives, those costs compound quickly across a financial year.

The Push Toward Deduplication

The Australian Signals Directorate's Information Security Manual, updated in its 2025 edition, tightened requirements around data minimisation — the principle that agencies should not retain more data than operationally necessary. Duplicate image files technically breach the spirit of those guidelines, and internal audits triggered by the manual's revision have been surfacing the problem in agency after agency across Russell Hill and the broader parliamentary triangle precinct.

Several agencies have begun deploying automated deduplication tools as part of broader digital housekeeping exercises. The process involves hash-based comparison — software generates a unique fingerprint for each file and flags identical fingerprints for review — but the human governance layer, deciding which copy is the authoritative record and what metadata to preserve, remains the slow and expensive part of the work.

For Canberra's public servants, the practical next step is straightforward even if the execution is not: any agency preparing a cloud migration should run a deduplication audit before moving a single file, not after. The National Archives provides frameworks for exactly this kind of remediation work, and its digital continuity guidance is publicly available. Agencies that defer the exercise until post-migration typically find the cost of retrospective clean-up significantly higher than proactive auditing would have been — a lesson several departments are, by all accounts, learning the hard way right now.