Concepts

A retrievability probe is only as useful as the mental model behind the numbers it prints. The chapters in this section cover the essential ones:

• Swarm references vs IPFS CIDs — what the 64-hex address actually identifies, and why this isn’t a CID.
• The stewardship probe — what GET /stewardship/{ref} does on the inside, and why it can disagree with a plain /bzz download.
• Multi-vantage and “partial” — what each row in the report represents, and how the top-level status is aggregated.
• Overlay, neighborhood, proximity order — the geometry of the Swarm address space and how bee-check annotates each vantage with its position relative to the chunk.
• Manifests and per-chunk drill-down — why a “yes” on stewardship sometimes hides per-chunk gaps, and what --per-chunk exposes.
• Postage batches and re-seeding — what a batch is, what makes one “usable”, and how re-seeding works under the hood.

If you only read three: Stewardship, Multi-vantage, and Proximity.