How to Make OBS Studio Portable on a USB Drive

Running OBS Studio as a portable application allows you to carry your stream layouts, recording settings, and profiles on a USB drive to use on any compatible computer without installation. This guide provides a quick, step-by-step walkthrough on how to download the correct version of OBS Studio, configure it for portable mode, and run it directly from your external drive.

Step 1: Prepare Your USB Drive

For the best performance, use a USB 3.0 (or faster) flash drive with at least 1 GB of free space. Ensure the drive is formatted to a file system compatible with the computers you plan to use, such as NTFS or exFAT, which support large file sizes.

Step 2: Download the OBS Studio ZIP File

To create a portable version, you must download the archive version of the software rather than the standard installer.

  1. Go to the official OBS Studio download page.
  2. Select Windows.
  3. Instead of clicking the main download button, click on Download ZIP (or obtain the .zip file from the official GitHub releases page).

Step 3: Extract the Files to Your USB Drive

Once the ZIP file has finished downloading, you need to transfer its contents to your flash drive.

  1. Open your USB drive in File Explorer.
  2. Create a new folder on the drive and name it something clear, such as OBS Studio Portable.
  3. Open the downloaded OBS Studio ZIP file and extract all of its contents directly into that new folder.

Step 4: Enable Portable Mode

By default, even the ZIP version of OBS Studio will attempt to save your settings and profiles to the host computer’s local AppData folder. To force OBS to save everything to your USB drive instead, you must create a specific trigger file.

  1. Open the OBS Studio Portable folder on your USB drive. You should see folders named bin, data, obs-plugins, and others.
  2. Right-click in the empty space of this main directory, hover over New, and select Text Document.
  3. Name this new file exactly: obs_portable_mode.txt
  4. Keep the file completely blank; its mere presence tells OBS Studio to run in portable mode.

Step 5: Launch Portable OBS Studio

Now that portable mode is enabled, you can run the application.

  1. Navigate to bin > 64bit inside your OBS folder.
  2. Double-click obs64.exe to launch the program.

All configuration files, scenes, profiles, and log files will now be saved within the config folder that OBS automatically creates inside your USB directory. When you want to use OBS on another computer, simply plug in your USB drive, navigate to the obs64.exe file, and run it.