The standard practice of a system refresh is carried out for a quality system but there are times where you carry out a refresh activities on development systems based on the requirements from the business. If you do a search on SC for development system refresh you can see thread where people have done this before. Such a practice (development system refresh) is not recommended by SAP as you end up losing the version history. Yes there are ways to retain them which is a different case.
Regards
RB