Leopard to Snow Leopard can i use a large flash drive to backup first?

I've been using Leopard for 4 years with no problems. 
Since Google decided to stop support for Leopard, and I use Chrome a lot I decided to upgrade.  I won't be upgrading to Mountain Lion right right away. I ordered my Snow Leopard disks from Apple.
I understand that I need to backup.  I want to backup with Time Machine before I upgrade the OS, but I don't have $75+ right now to purchase an external hard drive for this purpose only. 
Can I use a large Flash Drive to run Time Machine?  Like a 32 GB?   I know that flash drives have a limited number of writes on them and can go bad, so I am thinking I could just use it this one time to make sure I have a clean backup.  If this is possible, then can I set up Time Machine again later when I have an external drive?
Also, I have 2 cores on my Mac, but I have no idea how to use the 2nd core. 
I'm also not sure if I need to purchase a specific external drive because I have a mac. 
Thanks for the help.

If you only need to make a full backup prior to upgrading, I would suggest using SuperDuper, which for creating a full, bootable clone is free. (It is not free when you start needing to make incremental backups, but you won't be doing that, at least not right now.) For a bootable clone, you only need a Flash drive (or external drive) as big as the total size of the utilized space on your hard drive right now, not as big as whatever the entire drive size is.
In the past, I would have recommended Carbon Copy Cloner for this, but it's no longer free or donation-ware and you don't have the budget for both that and some kind of external or Flash drive.
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html
You might also want to look around newegg.com for inexpensive USB external drives, or even large enough Flash drives. You'll probably find a much less expensive external hard drive than a Flash drive for this purpose.
You do not need to use Time Machine, but even if you did you could just make one full backup to a Flash or external drive and then unmount and disconnect it. An external for TM only needs to be so large because it's constantly taking snapshots of your drive and those add up. But you won't be using it that way.
Anyway, I think you're much better off with a bootable clone, should you need to restore that.
Don't worry about having 2 cores; that's nothing to do with backing up.

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