Do you need Snow Leopard in order to have Mac OSX Lion?

You do not need Snow Leopard in order to install OSX Lion. Unless you want to UPGRADE from Snow Leopard, which would be a different setting once you insert the Lion installation disk., I'm guessing that you have bought OSX Lion and are planning to install it. Great! Go ahead and back things up now!, Go out and get an external hard drive to copy all you documents, photos, videos etc., to it. If you only have a handful of things to back up, you might want to try DropBox, it's an online backup solution for all your files! And it's all free for 2GB space. That is usually enough for documents and photos. You may find that solution at www.dropbox.com

Once you have went ahead and backed up everything, go ahead and follow instructions from Apple to do a fresh install or an upgrade. Note that if you do 'upgrade' you may still have files saved onto your computer from previous operating system. But if you do a FRESH install, you will be formatting the hard drive and will LOOSE all files and data but on the bright side, you will have a brand new computer that will run even smoother.

Good Luck.

Yes, you still need Snow Leopard in oder to install OS X Lion. The upgrade from Snow Leopard to Lion won't touch your documents or apps but still, it is highly encouraged that you back-up important stuff first.

Yes you should always back up before installing a new operating system or making system changes and you should back up on a regular schedule because one never knows when the OS will crash or a hard drive will fail and at some point and time one or both will occur.

Mac OSX Lion: http://www.apple.com/mac/

i imagine that that's accessible for them to order the disc to their keep, and then you purchase it there. If no longer, you should purchase credit in a applestore, and then purchase it on line :)