Best practices for headless installs on small VMs

When I intend to use Dropbox with the headless client on a VM with small amounts of storage, I always have to quickly add folders to the selective sync list so that the downloads don't quickly overload my storage. I could write a script that automatically traverses my Dropbox file directory and adds the folders to be excluded, but it would be much easier if there was simply an option to automatically set all folders to excluded by default so that I can pick and choose which folders actually get sync'ed onto the computer.

 

Does anyone have any best practices or tricks for dealing with a deluge of incoming Dropbox data when the program is first installed?