Ixpand not detected

I bought a 32GB Ixpand (the smaller thin one) and it initially worked on my iphone 6s and my wife’s.  We put hundreds of important  pictures on it and then used the app to delete those pictures off the iphones.  A few weeks later (and still today) everytime I try to plug it into the iphone 6s it gives a message “Ixpand would like to communicate with the sandisk ixpand flash drive” so I select “Allow”,  and then the app opens up and gives an error message “Failed to connect to ixpand drive.  Please remove and reattach.”  I do that, remove and reattach but nothing is ever detected.  

It also does not show up on my macbook or other PC’s that I’ve tried.  So now I have hundreds of important photos that have been deleted off our iphones and I am not able to access them on the flash drive.  HELP!

Have you tried closing the app (with the drive is still connected) and then manually re-opening the app? Or opening the app before connecting the drive?

Yes, I have tried that numerous times and the same error message comes up, and then the app says i should plug in the ixpand drive to get started.

if it is not detected on your iOS devices or computers the the drive may be bad. In this case the drive would need to be replaced. If you need data recovery you could send it to a company that provides data recovery services. 

If you used the iXpand Drive app to delete the pictures they may still be on your phone. iOS only allows third party apps to send deleted pictures to the recently deleted folder. If you have not permanently deleted the pictures from the recently deleted folder you may be able to restore them. After 30 days IIRC iOS will permanently delete anything in the recently deleted folder. 

It’s just insane to me that I have to pay $40 plus dollars to recover data because Sandisk sent me a faulty drive and their warranty doesn’t help with the data that Sandisk lost.  Not many companies can get away with something like this, most have the good reputation to cover the costs of the loss to the customer.  Shame on me for not doing my research and trusting Sandisk to deliver a good product or stand behind their product.  I’m very disappointed and will not be using any Sandisk flash drive with sensitive data again.