Docstoc offers simple sync with your hard drive

Online document-hosting service Docstoc on Thursday is introducing a useful new tool for PCs and Macs that will automatically back up and sync documents from your hard drive to your Docstoc account.

Considering the growing trend of Netbooks with relatively little built-in storage, users with this desktop application installed with be able to offload whatever they created without having worry about running out of room.

By default, the syncing application goes for your documents folder, though you can set it to sync up with other folders on your hard drive or folders within your home network. Documents that are automatically updated get set as private, so others will not be able to see them, but you can set specific folders as public too.

To help manage all these files, the document home screen has also been given an overhaul that the company is calling MyDocs. It offers a little bit more than the documents folder on your computer, with simple thumbnail views, as well as a quick preview mode that lets you open up documents of any size and nearly any file type in about a second.

If you're a Mac user running Leopard, you've been able to do this with the proper quick-look plug-ins, but this is all on the Web.

Docstoc creator and CEO Jason Lawrence Nazar tells me that future versions of the syncing tool will include bidirectional syncing, meaning that changes made to documents in the cloud can be pushed back to your local machine. This should be coming in "weeks."

In the meantime, a company called Dropbox (review) has been offering something similar. It also requires special desktop software to get the job done.

Related: New Microsoft Office competition from Zoho, Zooos

Docstoc now offers a bird's-eye view of your Web documents, complete with live previews and editing. Using the new utility, you can also have it sync up all the documents from your hard drive.

(Credit: Docstoc)