There's a little known feature in the new Google Drive where you can select a folder, click shift+z and then "add" it to another folder. From there on, the folder is located in both places.
This is useful if you use the selective sync feature. As you can selectively sync only the top-level folders, you can create a dedicated top-level sync folder for your laptop, "add" only those sub-folders you want to sync to your laptop to that sync folder, and then locally select it for syncing on your laptop. You'll be syncing only the stuff you need. I've created such a sync folder for every machine I have, and it works great.
However, if you decide you don't need a specific folder any longer on your laptop, how do you remove it from the laptop's sync folder without deleting the original. From my experimentation, simply deleting the folder in one of the locations, deletes it in both!!
