By the Numbers: Bendigo's Digital Archive Problem Is Bigger Than Anyone Admitted

The City of Greater Bendigo is sitting on a digital archive mess that runs to more than 47,000 duplicate image files, according to internal figures obtained by The Daily Bendigo this week. The council's records management team flagged the problem formally in May 2026, after a routine audit of the Content Manager document system revealed the scale of redundant data that had accumulated across departments over roughly eight years.

The timing matters. Bendigo Health's $630 million capital works expansion, centred on the new acute services building on Lucan Street, has generated an enormous volume of construction documentation, site photography and planning imagery since groundbreaking in 2023. That flood of new visual records exposed weaknesses in how the council and affiliated agencies store, tag and deduplicate image files. With La Trobe University's Bendigo campus on Edwards Road also midway through a facilities review that involves its own digital asset library, the problem is not confined to any single organisation.

What the Numbers Actually Show

The 47,000-plus duplicate files consume an estimated 2.3 terabytes of server space on the council's shared infrastructure. Each terabyte of managed cloud storage costs the City of Greater Bendigo approximately $340 per month under its current contract with its managed IT provider, meaning the redundant data alone is generating around $780 in unnecessary monthly expenditure. That figure does not include staff time. The records management team estimates it took auditors 114 hours across six weeks just to catalogue the problem, hours billed at the enterprise agreement rate for Level 5 administrative officers, which sits at $46.80 per hour under the 2025 Local Government Victoria enterprise bargain.

Duplicate images cluster most heavily in three areas: planning permit photography from the Hargreaves Street precinct redevelopment, flood event imagery from the 2022-23 La Niña responses around Kangaroo Flat and Eaglehawk, and promotional material produced for the Bendigo Art Gallery's touring exhibitions. In the gallery's case alone, auditors found 11 versions of some hero images stored under slightly different filenames, often because staff had downloaded, re-exported and re-uploaded the same asset without checking the repository first.

The council's Geographic Information Systems unit, based at the Lyttleton Terrace civic offices, has been trialling automated deduplication software since April. Early results suggest the tool can correctly identify and flag about 89 per cent of true duplicates without human review, though the remaining 11 per cent, files that are visually similar but not identical, still require a staff member to make the call. That residual workload is not trivial when applied to a library of nearly 50,000 flagged files.

Why Replacing Files Is Harder Than Deleting Them

Deletion is only part of the job. Many duplicate images are embedded in live planning documents, council reports tabled at the Ordinary Meeting of Council, and public-facing web pages. Removing a file without replacing or relinking it breaks the document. The records team has identified 3,400 such active references that will each need manual attention before the underlying duplicate can be safely retired.

Neighbouring councils have faced similar reckoning. Mount Alexander Shire completed a comparable deduplication project in late 2024 at a reported total cost of $58,000, covering both software licensing and contractor time. Bendigo's problem is proportionally larger, and early internal estimates put the remediation budget somewhere between $80,000 and $110,000 depending on how much work is contracted out versus handled in-house.

The council's Information Management Strategy, adopted in March 2025 and covering the period to 2030, commits the organisation to a single-instance storage model by the end of financial year 2027. That deadline is now the practical target for clearing the backlog. Residents and community organisations that regularly supply images to the council for event listings, heritage registers or planning submissions should expect a new file-naming and metadata protocol to be released for public consultation before December 2026. The draft protocol is expected to go before the council's Audit and Risk Committee before the end of the September quarter.