Do I need Snow Leopard to upgrade to Lion?

[Cranch]

As I understand it, Lion installs a separate small boot partition which can be used to run a clean install, disk utility, etc.…

This is probably at its most important, not to mention convenient, when your HDD crashes and no data on it or any of its partitions are there anymore.

Good point. Personally, I use Time Machine backing up to an external Seagate. They're on a decent surge suppressor, but should both drives go at once I guess the OS disks will have to be dusted off. 🙂

 

[iThinkergoiMac]

Good point. Personally, I use Time Machine backing up to an external Seagate. They're on a decent surge suppressor, but should both drives go at once I guess the OS disks will have to be dusted off. 🙂

It's a great system, but when you have no boot disc you're sunk. Lion, I believe, has a way to make a boot disc from within the system, so as long as you make one you should be OK.

I use TM and CarbonCopyCloner. That way, I have progressive backups of everything and a nightly bootable image of my computer as well.