If I were to make it run that command every 5 minutes, would there be any downsides?

It doesn’t happen often, but when it does happen I temporarily lose access to my media. But based on what others are saying here, it looks like it’s possible to manually remount my drive instead of rebooting. So I’ll give that a try.

Nope, I haven’t tried that. But I will give it a try when the next power outage occurs. I actually didn’t know I could manually remount until today. I’m still pretty new to selfhosting.

I shall give this a try the next time it loses power. Thank you.

auto-mounting system that only happens to run at boot

This is correct. I made my drive auto mount using /etc/fstab, and I believe that is only checked once during boot.

My /etc/fstab file currently has the following:

UUID=412ea77a-96e1-427c-9f75-2aae2fe0dca1 /mnt/wd ext4 defaults 0 2

If I were to use the mnt-data.mount you’ve suggested, does that mean I need to delete what I already have in /etc/fstab and replace it with what you suggested?

I had a laptop lying around and computer parts are too expensive now to build my own server, so that’s what I went with. Is the concern you have involving loss of data?