Roaming user profiles tend to grow over time, which is sometimes referred to as profile bloat. In and by itself, profile growth is not a problem. Users of desktop PCs who log on the the same machine every day will not even notice that they have huge profiles ready to follow them around the network. Their locally cached copy of the roaming profile is always current. No need to fetch anything from a file server during logon.
Terminal servers, on the other hand, are usually configured to delete cached copies of roaming profiles after logoff. That makes perfectly sense, since the chances that a user is going to end up on the same server the next time he logs on are the smaller the larger the farm is. Although practically a necessity, the deletion of cached profiles poses entirely new problems: profile sizes have to be restricted somehow or logon times will shoot through the roof.
How not to do it
It may seem tempting to simply put file system quotas on the profile directories on the file servers. But that would lead not to smaller but to incomplete profiles. Once the quota on the file server is reached, the terminal server logging off the user will simply stop copying files over. Files that did not make it to the sanctuary of the roaming profile will mercilessly be deleted by the terminal server. The result is data loss.
To learn more and to read the entire article at its source, please refer to the following page, Helge Klein - How to Reduce the Size of Roaming Profiles
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