How to Password Protect OBS Studio Profiles

OBS Studio does not offer a native password-protection feature to lock your profiles or scene collections directly within the software. However, you can secure your streaming setups and prevent unauthorized access or accidental edits by utilizing operating system user accounts, encrypting your configuration folders, or running a portable version of OBS Studio from a secure drive.

Why OBS Studio Lacks Native Password Protection

OBS Studio is an open-source software designed for accessibility and performance. Because it saves all settings, profiles, and scene collections in local configuration files on your computer, anyone with access to your user account can open OBS and modify your setups. There is currently no built-in setting to lock the interface or require a PIN upon startup.

The most secure and seamless way to protect your OBS profiles is by using separate user accounts on your operating system (Windows, macOS, or Linux).

OBS Studio stores profiles and scene collections in user-specific directories. If you share a computer, create a separate standard user account for other users and password-protect your administrator account. Since other users cannot access your account’s private app data folder, they will not be able to view, edit, or delete your personal OBS profiles.

Method 2: Encrypt the OBS Configuration Folders

If you must share a single computer login, you can manually encrypt or password-protect the folders where OBS saves your data.

  1. Close OBS Studio completely.
  2. Navigate to the OBS configuration folder:
    • Windows: Press Win + R, type %APPDATA%\obs-studio\basic and press Enter.
    • macOS: Open Finder, press Cmd + Shift + G, and go to ~/Library/Application Support/obs-studio/basic.
  3. Locate the profiles and scenes folders.
  4. Use file encryption software (such as VeraCrypt or AxCrypt) to encrypt these folders, or compress them into a password-protected .zip or .rar archive using 7-Zip or WinRAR when you are not streaming. You will need to decrypt or extract them back into the directory before launching OBS.

Method 3: Run OBS Studio in Portable Mode on a Secure Drive

You can run OBS Studio entirely from a USB flash drive or an encrypted external hard drive. This ensures that your profiles and scenes go with you and cannot be accessed when the drive is unplugged.

  1. Download the ZIP version of OBS Studio from the official website.
  2. Extract the files to a folder on your USB drive or an encrypted partition (e.g., a BitLocker-protected drive).
  3. In the extracted folder, create an empty text file and name it obs_portable_mode.txt.
  4. Run obs64.exe from the bin\64bit folder.

All profiles, scene collections, and settings will now be saved directly to the USB drive instead of the computer’s internal storage, keeping your configurations completely private.