TheDragon (GivEnergy) To boot from a USB or SSD:
plug USB/SSD drive into your RPi
use SD Card copier to copy the SD card partitions
Shut down Rpi
Remove SD Card
Power up
If you have a bigish SSD and you want additional partitions:
After power up above,
wait for the filesystem root to resize
shut it down
put the SD card back in and reboot (if it doesn't reboot from SD, you might have to remove USB/SSD and insert once booted)
run GParted to change the partition size on your USB/SSD
remove SD card again
Reboot
Then wait for the USB/SSD to fail!! In the meantime, do a SD Card copy regularly to keep as backup unless you want to rebuild from scratch when you're under time pressure.