Comprehensive metadata are key to making data FAIR. It is therefore essential to collect metadata in an organized and standardized way. For standardized data acquisition, ie. on research vessels, tools are already available and constantly improved. In land-based permafrost expeditions, however, the data and metadata are as diverse as the science questions behind them. We present an overview of this diversity in (meta)data and (meta)data collection and propose strategies to writing good and comprehensive metadata. We encourage to think about metadata right from the start and work on them steadily during the whole process from field work preparation to data collection and from data analysis to final publication. Easy to adapt templates and only choosing the tools that fit the specific data set increases the participation of the whole team.