I understood that I can create a service that would run and perform certain tasks in the background. But I actually only need to execute a task that needs to be done every 5 minutes. It needs not to run in between.
Now I was thinking that it may be a better idea to have a crontab entry that runs the (python) download script every 5 minutes. I am new to Linux and may have an incorrect understanding of what cron is for and what good practices are, but to me it seems as if this is a much more stable way because if the script would halt for any reason it will just be re-run.
What would be the recommended approach in that case? A (well-behaved) daemon that waits 5 minutes, or a cron that runs a script that just stops when done.